Title:
Orchid Blues
Author:
Stuart
Woods
Genre:
Fiction / Mystery / Suspense
Format:
CD, 7 CDs, 9 Hours, Unabridged
Narrator: Dick Hill & Susie
Breck
Pub
Date:
June 2004
Description:
Holly is on her way to
be married to Jackson Oxenhandler, her steady beau, when her wedding day is
shattered by a serious crime that takes place very close to home. A highly
disciplined team of men hit a bank in Orchid Beach, Florida, and the waves from
this robbery nearly capsize Holly's life. She vows to find these men - who have
been careful enough to leave nothing behind except the corpse of a bank customer
- and quickly, she discovers evidence that leads her into the midst of what
appears to be a politically motivated clan. Her father, Ham, a retired Army
chief master sergeant, is her ticket into this strange world, and what Ham finds
there stuns both Holly and her FBI contact, Harry Crisp.
Holly and Ham find themselves sucked into a
whirlpool of crazed criminality and, in the end, the FBI can do little to help
them. This time, Holly, Ham, and Daisy are on their own, and they wouldn't have
it any other way.
Review:
This second thriller in
the series Woods inaugurated with Orchid Beach starts with a bang a literal one.
While series heroine Holly Barker, a former military police commander turned
police chief of smalltown Orchid Beach, Fla., waits at the local courthouse to
marry lawyer Jackson Oxenhandler, her fianc‚ gets himself killed in a shoot-out
at Orchid Beach's bank. Once past this shocker of an opening, the thrills
quickly deflate. Holly stifles a few sobs, gets back into uniform and sets off
to track down the gunmen, a gang of highly organized robbers who planned to
heist $4 million in payroll cash. It soon becomes clear that they aren't
ordinary robbers, however, appearing to have some connection to a weird little
town in a neighboring county, where the average resident is white, male and a
gun nut. In the course of his meandering tale, Woods deepens his portraits of
Holly and her father, Ham, a retired army noncom, and dog lovers should enjoy
the antics of Daisy, the Doberman diva who is Holly's constant companion. Stone
Barrington, the cop-turned-lawyer from such Woods bestsellers as L.A. Dead,
makes a couple of important cameo appearances. But pages of lifeless dialogue
and too much dead air in an already thin narrative eventually stifle most of the
book's energy. Woods knows how law enforcement agencies from local cop shops to
the Secret Service work, and his action scenes are clean and sharp. But in
between there are a lot of empty spaces. 16-city author tour. Copyright 2001
Cahners Business Information, Inc. -
Publishers
Weekly
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