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CHOPPY WATER by Stuart Woods

CHOPPY WATER

by Stuart Woods

Pub Date: Aug. 11th, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18829-3
Publisher: Putnam

Being president-elect of the United States is no bed of roses for former Secretary of State Holly Barker, who’s marked for assassination even before she takes the oath of office.

Retired Army Col. Wade Sykes, aka Watchman, and his white supremacist cabal, who’ve somehow managed to tolerate the presidency of Katharine Lee, have drawn a line in the sand since Holly was elected in the closing pages of Hit List (2020). Luckily, Holly has a secret weapon: her sometime lover Stone Barrington, the New York lawyer who survived his own targeting for death in the same installment. The first attempt on Holly’s life, which appropriately takes place during a secret vacation at Stone’s place in Dark Harbor, Maine, leaves six dispensable Secret Service agents dead but doesn’t muss Holly’s hair. So Sykes and company, nothing daunted, try again in a series of increasingly improbable locations. For all their pains, Holly, a longtime franchise character, is probably a lot safer than Elizabeth Potter, a brand-new undercover FBI agent who’s infiltrated Sykes’ inner circle without quite winning his unconditional trust. As she twists slowly in the wind, she notices that another Sykes intimate seems to be acting like a double agent too. Wonder how that will work out—especially given Stone’s bleak reflection that “it could be like this for the next eight years”?

Despite the allegedly high stakes, Woods delivers all the facile thrills of an unusually sedate video game.