Publishers Weekly
05/21/2018
Blackmail drives bestseller Woods and Edgar-finalist Hall’s exciting second novel starring former CIA agent Teddy Faye (after 2016’s You Will Know Me). Teddy is working as a stunt man on an action film for Centurion Studios in Hollywood when the female lead, Tessa Bachetti, comes to him with a problem. Someone is threatening to release a compromising video taken without Tessa’s knowledge during her student days at Oxford that could ruin her career, unless she agrees to vote her shares in Centurion stock in favor of those, hidden by shell companies, who are seeking a hostile takeover of the studio at the next shareholders meeting (over which lawyer Stone Barrington, the hero of Woods’s long-running main series, will preside). Teddy sets out to identify and take out those behind the scheme, who burn down his house and otherwise try to eliminate him. The authors slyly upset the readers’ expectations in a number of scenes where the good guys seem to be in mortal peril. A tight plot, distinctive villains, and a neat resolution make this entry a winner. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Brisk, smooth, and entertaining crime fiction; an ideal summer read.”—Booklist
More Praise for The Money Shot
“A tight plot, distinctive villains, and a neat resolution make this entry a winner.”—Publishers Weekly
“A perfect airplane read the next time you're jetting to La-La Land.”—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Smooth Operator
“Fast-moving, full of action, sexy and now with a very bright, devious new hero in Teddy Fay … It is like eating forbidden fruit, sugary cotton candy or forbidden chocolate brownies with nuts. You know it isn’t good for you, but you can’t put it down! Just go ahead and read it.”—Lincoln Journal-Star
“Fans are sure to welcome this action-packed start to a separate series within the larger Stone Barrington story arc.”—Publishers Weekly
“Woods has millions of fans accumulated over the last 35 years who will read anything with his name on it, and Hall brings his own considerable following to the party. Entertaining, suspenseful reading for those who like smart-ass protagonists who are shrewder, tougher, and funnier than the bad guys they encounter.”—Booklist
Kirkus Reviews
2018-05-15
Teddy Fay, the ex-CIA op and ex-assassin now working as a producer and stuntman at Centurion Pictures (Smooth Operator, 2016), goes up against two different tribes bent on making trouble for the studio where he's found a home.Before she married future Centurion head Ben Bacchetti, Tessa Tweed was an undergraduate at Oxford whose boyfriend Nigel Hightower III made a sex tape of them without telling her. Now someone's gotten a hold of the tape and is determined to bend her to their will. The blackmailers, Star Pictures head Mason Kimble, still smarting over the rejection of one of his B-movie projects by Centurion director Peter Barrington, and his one-time frat brother Gerard Cardigan, plan to take control of Centurion by forcing Tessa, who owns a crucial block of shares, to vote in favor of their hostile takeover. And they're not the only bad hombres with mergers on their mind. Sammy Candelosi, who's just purchased a Las Vegas casino next door to Pete Genaro's New Desert Inn, is convinced Genaro's operation would be more profitable under his own management, and his less-than-legal maneuverings eventually put Teddy, now calling himself Billy Barnett so that he won't be troubled by people who once knew him as Billy Burnett, in his sights as well. The complication that renders all these nefarious plots utterly unthreatening is that neither the murderous blackmailers nor the mobbed-up Vegas casino owner nor Slythe, his knife-wielding bodyguard, has any idea what an adversary they're up against in Teddy, whose loyalty to Centurion is matched only by his uncanny skill at self-preservation.Reliable, pleasantly overplotted, low-impact thrills make this a perfect airplane read the next time you're jetting to La-La Land.
