STUART WOODS' FINDERS KEEPERS

The marital woes of a friend and client’s great-niece lead Stone Barrington into trouble in an utterly unexpected way. That’s the last unexpected thing that happens.

Sara Hirschy’s estranged husband in Chicago is doing everything he can to slow-walk their divorce, and her lawyer isn’t helping much. So Stone promises her uncle, Jack Coulter, that he’ll do what he can to help. Within minutes of their meeting, though, it’s Jack who needs help, because he’s spotted by an old confederate who (correctly) thinks he recognizes him as Johnny Fratelli, who spent close to five years in prison, and fingers him to mobster Ricky Gennaro, who has excellent reasons for wanting Fratelli dead. As Stone, who’s old enough to be Sara’s father, chastely finds a new lawyer for her and moves on to his own less icky romance with Tamlyn Thompson, the new chief technical officer of Strategic Services, word spreads through New York’s underworld that Fratelli, whose cellmate was the late Eduardo Buono, mastermind of the legendary JFK Airport heist, has been given a new nose and a new identity, and the vultures begin to circle. Stone and Jack Coulter still find time to fly to England, where Stone’s old friend and lover Dame Felicity Devonshire throws a party to announce her impending retirement as head of MI6. Even before they return, though, Gennaro starts his campaign of vengeance. The body count, initially slow to ascend, accelerates rapidly as different cabals of gangsters compete with each other for that missing robbery haul. But it’s hard to care very much about which disposable bad guy will dispose of the other disposable bad guys and come out on top.

Lightweight, overextended, and utterly inconsequential, as long as you don’t happen to be one of those hoodlums.