Rating: 
Summary: Disapointed
Review: The latest Stuart Wood Book is a total disappointment I have read about ten of Mr. Woods mysteries and found this one a waste of time. The dialogue was akin to The Bobsey twins meet the Hardy Boys at Tom Swifts summer detective camp
Rating:
Summary: No Improvement
Review: This author has had a few good efforts, "Chiefs" in particular. But since he has started w/the Stone Barrington series w/his main squeeze Carrington Barrington for god`s sake, he has fallen into the realm of Sidney Sheldon et all. No depth to either his characters or his story lines. Plots a 7th grader would reject I occasionaly pick one up ever hopeful but this condition is terminal. He will still sell his trash so he won`t work at his craft. Blood Orchid is truly a "quick read" little to pique ones ones curiosity or for that matter challenge you to think beyond the obvious. A "last resort".
Rating:
Summary: No Improvement
Review: This author has had a few good efforts, "Chiefs" in particular. But since he has started w/the Stone Barrington series w/his main squeeze Carrington Barrington for god`s sake, he has fallen into the realm of Sidney Sheldon et all. No depth to either his characters or his story lines. Plots a 7th grader would reject I occasionaly pick one up ever hopeful but this condition is terminal. He will still sell his trash so he won`t work at his craft. Blood Orchid is truly a "quick read" little to pique ones ones curiosity or for that matter challenge you to think beyond the obvious. A "last resort".
Rating:
Summary: No Improvement
Review: This author has had a few good efforts, "Chiefs" in particular. But since he has started w/the Stone Barrington series w/his main squeeze Carrington Barrington for god`s sake, he has fallen into the realm of Sidney Sheldon et all. No depth to either his characters or his story lines. Plots a 7th grader would reject I occasionaly pick one up ever hopeful but this condition is terminal. He will still sell his trash so he won`t work at his craft. Blood Orchid is truly a "quick read" little to pique ones ones curiosity or for that matter challenge you to think beyond the obvious. A "last resort".
Rating: 
Summary: Standard Woods
Review: This book is standard Stuart Woods: lightly entertaining and a quick read featuring familiar characters and larger-than-life crime. It is three-and-a-half star material all the way.In this story, Holly Barker, police chief for Orchid Beach, becomes embroiled in a real estate scheme that has murders attached to it. Befriending a developer who is almost killed himself, Holly gets involved from the inside as well as in her cop role. What follows is the sort of quick paced action one expects out of one of Woods's books. As entertaining as the book is, it's also far from perfect. Any veteran mystery reader will have the villain pegged pretty quickly and there are other bits of silliness. For example, I doubt most people would think that "Blood Orchid" would be a good name for a housing development. On the other hand, Holly is much more interesting than Woods's principal series character, Stuart Barrington, although not as developed as Will Lee. For a fun quick read, this book fits the bill, but in the grand pool of mysteries, this book is definitely on the shallow end.
Rating:
Summary: Holly Barker again
Review: This is another of Stuart Woods' mysteries, this time following the adventures of his female-army-MP-turned-small-town-police-chief, Holly Barker. Orchid Beach is a small town with about a hundred murders a year to liven things up a bit (or so it seems) and it's had special problems with a development outside of town that mobsters tried to use to smuggle money out of the country. In this installment, more violence ensues, and Holly has to figure out who's trying to kill her, or bug her phone, or whatever. Daisy the Dog returns (still fetching beer from the fridge when commanded) and is joined by a cute undercover FBI agent, an interesting handsome older man, several vicious criminals (including one wielding an Uzi in one hand and a pizza in the other), and an assortment of various characters. Woods has gotten to the point now where he doesn't write the story much any more, he just lets you imagine what's happening, or what people look like or think. There's not much character development outside of the actions they take, and the dialog tends to be very clipped and concise. There isn't that much meat to the story either (I figured out who the bad guy was about halfway through the story, well before Holly does), but it's fun anyway. For one thing, Woods has a wonderful way of making the story hum along so that you're turning the pages constantly and getting to the next chapter. For another, there's something to be said for keeping things concise. Robert B. Parker's made a living at it for several decades now.
Rating:
Summary: Blood Orchid, Woods back to top form
Review: This is more like what I expect from Mr. Woods. The story moves quickly and the players keep you turning the pages. Unlike some of Mr. Woods other fare it takes a 100 pages before the main lady "hits the sack" and in my opinion that is a good thing. Give it a try, if you like action, mystery and a well paced yarn you will not be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Save your money, save your time, don't bother with this book
Review: This is the first and last Woods book I'll ever read. I picked it up while on vacation because the inside cover made it sound like a Grisham-esque style story of crime, intrigue, love, mystery. All it was was a series of phone calls between Holly and Hurd, Ham, Harry, et al. The writing was dull and uninspriring. The most common sentence in the book was "Holly hung up." Well, if you're going to fill the book with phone conversations, at least try to be a original from time to time when indicating that the call ended. Another thing that irked me---the characters often used the term "got dead." Huh? Is this a form of English only the cops and fibbies use...or just Woods? For those who had not read previous the previous adventures of Holly, it would have been nice to know a little more about her. What she looked like, her age, etc. All we learned is that she was a police chief with a wooden personality. I feel I know Nancy Drew better and I hadn't read about her in years! Can't wait for winter so I can chuck this book into the fireplace.
Rating:
Summary: pulp fiction
Review: Trite. Predictable. And doesn't he proofread his work? Why didn't her dog see the burglar the first time he came into the house?
Rating:
Summary: are there more boring books?
Review: truman capote once said of jack kerouac's work, 'it's not writing, it's typing'. now sadly in his dotage, woods isn't even typing, at best i guess he's dictating.
today's readers deserve a modicum of verisimilitude. i mean, when we have read all these police procedural novels and watched crime scene investigations on tv, even the dumbest of us knows that you can't just gloss over things the way woods does because he is too lazy to do other than wing things as he goes along. holly is not a real person, she is a crassly drawn cartoon character with a dog. the author's vanity extends to including a character, ed vine, 'with thick perfectly white hair' who is obviously a mirror of himself, judging from the back cover photo. woods also tries to curry favour by sucking up to carl hiassen. but none of these gimmicks work. the book is dead boring. everyone is entitled to his opinion, but i truly wonder who these people are who have so much money and so little critical judgement that they buy wood's books and are not subsequently offended at the lack of entertainment and artistry in what they have paid so much over the odds for. can they all be relatives? or friends paid to write these reviews of five stars? get real
| 
