Dead in the Water by Stuart Woods

Dead in the Water by Stuart Woods

Stone Barrington is back. Stuart Woods has created no better known or loved character than the ex-cop, Manhattan attorney and investigator whose work treads the thin line between the respectable practice of law and the dark side of humanity.

In Dead in the Water, Stone has hardly arrived in St. Marks, a lovely Caribbean island nation, on a sailing vacation when something very strange happens: a beautiful young woman sails into the harbor, entirely alone on a large yacht. Before long, she is under the intense scrutiny of the local authorities, in the very considerable person of Sir Winston Sutherland, the minister of justice. The problem is, though she arrived alone, she had departed the other side of the Atlantic in the company of her husband, a well-known writer, who is no longer in evidence.

Evidence is what fascinates Stone Barrington, and he is all that stands between the apparently innocent Allison Manning and the patently evil intent of Sir Winston, whose motives are unclear. What is clear is that the St. Marks system of justice bears little resemblance to the American courts to which Stone is accustomed, and that his smallest error could prove fatal to his client. Dead in the Water is a rollercoaster ride, teeming with the plot twists that have made the novels of Stuart Woods New York Times bestsellers and international hits.

Stuart Woods was born in the small town of Manchester, Georgia. He graduated from the University of Georgia with a B.A. in sociology and moved to Atlanta, where he enlisted in the Air National Guard. In the fall of 1960, Woods moved to New York in search of a career in writing, and remained there for a decade working in advertising, with the exception of ten months spent in Mannheim, Germany with the National Guard during the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961-62.

An attack of wanderlust drew Woods to London, where he worked in advertising agencies until the idea of writing a novel called him to a small flat in the stableyard of a castle in County Galway, Ireland. There, Woods completed one hundred pages of a novel before he discovered sailing, after which, everything went to hell. All I did was sail.

Woods took his sailing to a higher level, competing in the Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) in 1976, and the catastrophic Fastnet Race in 1979 in which fifteen competitors died. In October and November of that year, Woods sailed his friend's yacht across the Atlantic, calling at the ports of Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands, before finishing at Antigua in the Caribbean.

The next couple of years were spent in Georgia, where Woods wrote two non-fiction books: Blue Water, Green Skipper, an account of his Irish experience and the subsequent transatlantic race; and a travel guide entitled A Romantic Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland, which Woods says he wrote on a whim. W.W. Norton in New York bought the rights to Blue Water, Green Skipper, and published Woods' first novel, Chiefs, in 1981. Chiefs won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America that year, was nominated for Palindrome, and was made into a six-hour television drama starring Charlton Heston for CBS. In 2006, Woods had two New York Times national bestsellers with Dark Harbor and Short Straw, and repeated the feat in 2007 with Fresh Disasters and Shoot Him If He Runs.

Woods, who has written thirty-three novels, currently resides in Florida, New York City and Maine.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780060183684
ISBN 10	0060183683
Title	Dead in the Water
Author	Stuart Woods
Series	Stone Barrington Novel Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers
Year published	1997-08-01
Number of pages	325
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.