Scandalous Behavior

November 9, 2015
In bestseller Woods’s extravagant 36th Stone Barrington’s novel (after 2015’s Foreign Affairs), the peripatetic multimillionaire travels to England, where Dame Felicity Devonshire, the director of MI6, gives him a tour of Windward Hall, the Hampshire estate Felicity tells Stone he should buy from its terminally ill owner, Sir Charles Bourne. The same day that Stone pays £10 million for Windward Hall, he purchases a new wardrobe, a Bentley, and a Porsche in London. The murder of a Hampshire neighbor, Sir Richard Curtis, provides a minor distraction. Meanwhile, Hell’s Bells, the latest movie from Stone’s filmmaker son, Peter, has made an enemy of Don Beverly Calhoun, the leader of an L.A.-based cult called the Chosen Few. Calhoun also takes a dislike to Stone, who discovers that Calhoun is attempting to purchase Curtis’s newly available estate. A series of escalating, sometimes amusing, tit-for-tat maneuvers ensue and eventually turn deadly. As his many fans have come to expect, Stone remains unflappable throughout. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit.