Hothouse Orchid

Overview

A brand-new page-turning Holly Barker novel from the perennially entertaining New York Times?bestselling author Stuart Woods. After Special Agent Holly Barker lets international terrorist Teddy Fay slip through her fingers for a second time, the CIA thinks she might want a long vacation, at least until Teddy is captured and the bad publicity has blown over. So Holly returns to her hometown of Orchid Beach, Florida, where she had been police chief for many years. But a very unpleasant surprise awaits her. Many years earlier, Holly and another female army officer had brought charges against their commanding officer for sexual harassment, attempted rape, and rape. Holly had managed to fight him off, but the other woman, a young lieutenant, had not. The officer in question was acquitted of all charges, and has also left the army?for a job as Orchid Beach?s new police chief. Will Holly return to the CIA? Or will she challenge her old nemesis for control of the Orchid Beach Police Department?

Editorial Reviews

Bestseller Woods piles on the coincidences in his modestly entertaining fifth thriller to feature CIA agent Holly Barker (after Iron Orchid). When Holly returns home to Orchid Beach, Fla., where she was once chief of police, she's reunited with both welcome and unwelcome figures from her past. Renegade ex-CIA agent Teddy Fay, sporting a new identity, has chosen to settle in nearby Vero Beach. Lauren Cade, a former military comrade, is now a sergeant with the Florida State Patrol. Holly is shocked to learn that James Bruno, her former commanding officer who was tried and acquitted of raping Lauren and who once tried to rape Holly herself, is Orchid Beach's new police chief. Holly's not so shocked to learn that a serial killer and rapist is at work in the area. Woods glibly lets the reader stay well ahead of the legal posse tracking the killer while still keeping a card or two up his sleeve. Playful dialogue and romantic sexual escapades lighten the atmosphere. (Sept.)
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Author Information

Bio of Stuart Woods

Stuart Woods was born in the small southern town of Manchester, Georgia and attended the local public schools, then graduated from the University of Georgia, with a BA in sociology. After college, he spent a year in Atlanta and two months in basic training for what he calls "the draft-dodger program" of the Air National Guard. Then, in the autumn of 1960, he moved to New York, in search of a writing job. The magazines and newspapers weren't hiring, so he got a job in a training program at an advertising agency, earning seventy dollars a week. "It is a measure of my value to the company," he says, "that my secretary was earning eighty dollars a week." He spent the whole of the nineteen-sixties in New York, with the exception of ten months, which he spent in Mannheim, Germany, at the request of John F. Kennedy. The Soviets had built the Berlin Wall, and Woods, along with a lot of other national guardsmen, was sent to Germany, " . . . to do God knows what," as he puts it. What he did, he says, was " . . . fly a two-and-a-half-ton truck up and down the autobahn." He notes that the truck was all he flew in the Air Force. At the end of the sixties, he moved to London and worked there for three years in various advertising agencies. In early 1973, he decided that the time had come for him to write the novel he had been thinking about since the age of ten. He moved to Ireland, where some friends found him a small flat in the stable yard of a castle in south County Galway, and he supported himself by working two days a week for a Dublin ad agency, while he worked on the novel. Then, about a hundred pages into the book, he discovered sailing, and " . . . everything went to hell. All I did was sail." been prolific, writing many, many novels. He is a licensed, instrument-rated private pilot, and currently flies a Jetprop (scroll down for a photo of Stuart at the controls!), which is a Piper Malibu Mirage (a six-passenger, pressurized single-engine airplane) in which the piston engine has been replaced by a turboprop (a jet engine turning a propeller). He sails on other peoples' boats, owns a 28-foot power boat, and is a partner in a 85-foot antique motor yacht built in 1935 and recently restored to like-new condition. Stuart Woods is an archetypal man of mystery. He's hard to keep an eye on: he has homes in Florida, on an island off the coast of Maine, and in New York City. He can drive or pilot pretty much anything you can think of: he has his own powerboat and is a licensed airplane pilot. He also has quite a way with words: he's written 25 mystery novels--one of which, Chiefs, won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allen Poe award and was made into a CBS miniseries starring Charlton Heston and featuring Danny Glover and John Goodman. Woods took a couple of minutes during his 18-city book tour for his latest Stone Barrington novel, The Short Forever (published April 15, 2002), to speak to T+L about the benefits of flying his own jet and about how his travels have shaped his books and his life.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Putnam Adult

Filesize

1.54 MB

Number of Pages

304

eBook ISBN

9781101144930