Stone’s law firm is on retainer for wealthy software developer, Thad Shames, the archetypal computer nerd. While at a cocktail party Thad meets and dines with a lady known only as Liz. Deciding he is in love, Thad employs Stone to find her. His clue is that she was seen boarding a flight to Palm Beach where Thad has a home.

Stone heads to Palm Beach in the company of Callie, Thad’s attractive personal assistant. Stone wastes little time finding Liz, but is shocked to discover she is really Allison Manning, a woman he saved from the gallows a few years back. (Dead in the Water) Now known as Elizabeth Harding, she fears her first husband may be stalking her

Stone had represented her when she was charged with the murder of her husband Paul. It was an insurance scam and her husband was not dead. Stone found that her husband had even been at the trial posing as a magazine writer. Stone believed that Allison had been killed in a small plane crash soon after the trial

Not only is Allison/Liz alive, but in the meantime she remarried and that husband has died leaving lots more insurance money. Liz now hires Stone to settle the initial fraud with the insurance company and reveals that she believes Paul is trying to kill her.

The scene is now set, and a series of incidents follow in an intricately plotted suspense story. Stone comes to believe that more than one person may be trying to kill Allison, aka Liz, and his search ranges up and down the Atlantic coast.

The characters burst forth in this book fully developed. The author takes the easy path of moving the story along by flip, sarcastic and often pedestrian dialogue as the scenes shift swiftly. The reader becomes a mere observer in a plot that although complicated, is very predictable.

Fans of Stuart Woods and Stone Barrington will no doubt jump right into the story and view it differently from those of us who are making an acquaintance of Stone and other players from past stories for the first time.

Woods sustains the tension well, but the conclusion of the story is reached a bit too neatly...all is finally revealed in an overheard conversation. Still, for summer reading, Cold Paradise is a well constructed story that costs little in emotion.

--Thea Davis