FOREIGN Affairs

The bride gave me a pile of books to read for Christmas. This was the first I grabbed, to replace the John Irving novel that has lost me in the Philippines.
Foreign Affairs is a novel written by Stuart Woods, a man who as a boy my mother in-law taught in a Dearing, Georgia  (silent e) elementary school back in the 1940's.
The cover describes Stuart Woods as a New York Times bestselling author. Which after reading this book diminishes my impression of the vaulted New York Times listing. Publishing in 2015, this is a short novel of 308 pages, those having 1.5 spacing and wide margins. It hardly has to be mentioned that this is a fast read.
Let me save you some trouble and tell you the story.
The hero is Stone Barrington, a former New York city policeman who through superior intellect has amassed a large fortune involving businesses around world. Stone is pulled out of a New York dinner party for an emergency board meeting in Italy to discuss a new hotel being built. Getting the first available flight he's seated next a sexy young lady who becomes the focus of the plot. In Italy things become complicated when a local mobster tries to extort the hotel company into becoming partners. Being the studly man that the name Stone infers, Barrington tells the man to pound sand. The mobster reacts by kidnapping the young lady and impose a partnership. Barrington gets the CIA, FBI, POTUS, Italian Intelligence and MI6 all involved because he knows everyone and everyone owes him a favor. Naturally the girl is saved and the guinea bastard is jailed.
There, no you do not have to read the book.
Wait for the television movie, its perfect for one of those crap portrayals.
In case you are interested there are 81 such Woods novels out there, he writes about four per year.
Back to John Irving.