Santa Fe Edge By Stuart Woods Putnam Adult Large Print Edition, 2010, 416 pages ISBN 978-0399156977 Genre: Thriller

Reviewed by Israel Drazin - February 7, 2011

This delightful, well-written, fast-moving mystery has several plotlines that swerve about seemingly unrelated, but converge into an interesting web. Ed Eagle is a Santa Fe attorney married to a movie starlet, but had been married to a murderess Barbara who is incarcerated in a Mexican jail. Barbara sleeps with men and women and enjoys both. Ed is hired by a golf pro, Tip Hanks, who returns home after a golf tournament to find his wife murdered. He finds her in their bed in a position indicating she had just had sex. Tip is not too broken up about his wife's death nor too upset that she has been sleeping around. Tip is absolved of the murder when the police find two sets of lipstick on the pillow of her bed indicating that her partner was a woman. Tip is approached by a beautiful woman, Dolly, who claims she was hired as a secretary by his wife. He keeps her on the payroll and lets her stay in a cottage on his property. She hears about the lipstick stain on the pillow and destroys her own lipstick. Barbara is repeatedly assaulted sexually by the Mexican prison warden, but finds a way to drug him and escape. She is helped by a man who is involved in a movie that Ed Eagle's wife is in. Barbara is determined to kill Ed Eagle and heads to Santa Fe to do so. She sees Tip on TV, thinks he is handsome, and rents a house next to his. She meets Dolly and they sleep together on the night they meet. Ed hears about Barbara's escape and hires two private detectives to find her. Teddy Fay a rogue ex-CIA killer, who had been thought to be dead, is discovered to be still alive, and the CIA sends an operative to find him.

• Hothouse Orchid, by Stuart Woods.
  After Special Agent Holly Barker lets international terrorist Teddy Fay slip through her fingers for a second time, she returns to her hometown of Orchid Beach, Florida, where she had been police chief for many years. But a very unpleasant surprise awaits her...
  
  
• Mounting Fears, by Stuart Woods.
  President Will Lee is having a rough week. His vice president just died, and the governor nominated to replace him has a few skeletons in his closet. Plus there is a rogue CIA agent plotting revenge on the CIA director and a few loose nukes in Pakistan...