List $29.95

Written by Stuart Woods - Audio book performed by Tony Roberts - Unabridged Fiction - 7 COMPACT DISCS - 8 hours

Publisher, Brilliance Audio (April 2006)

Stuart Woods's newest bestseller, Dark Harbor, brings us the perfect mix of sexy intrigue and swift suspense that have earned him legions of fans over the years. In this latest thriller, Stone enters the picturesque town Dark Harbor off the coast of Maine, where the shocking deaths of three people have cast a long shadow over this island haven--a locale as mysterious as it is exclusive.

Stone Barrington hasn't heard from his cousin, Dick Stone, in years--though he has fond memories of a teenage summer spent at his house in Maine. Then, Lance Cabot of the CIA interrupts an otherwise pleasant meal at Elaine's with news of Dick's death--apparently by his own hands. It seems that Dick Stone, a quiet family man who doubled as a CIA agent, methodically executed his wife, daughter, and then himself--or did he? What would cause a loving father and husband to murder his family as they slept? Before his death, Dick had appointed Stone executor of his will, giving him full control of the disposition of a sizable family estate. Was Dick preparing for his suicide, or forewarning Stone of his murder?

With the help of his ex-partner, Dino, and his friend Holly Barker, Stone must settle the estate and piece together the elusive facts of his cousin's life and death as a CIA operative. At every step Stone knows he is being watched by Dick's family-and one of them just may be a killer.

About the Author: Stuart Woods was born in the small southern town of Manchester, Georgia and attended the local public schools, then graduated from the University of Georgia, with a BA in sociology.

After college, he spent a year in Atlanta and two months in basic training for what he calls "the draft-dodger program" of the Air National Guard. Then, in the autumn of 1960, he moved to New York, in search of a writing job. The magazines and newspapers weren't hiring, so he got a job in a training program at an advertising agency, earning seventy dollars a week. "It is a measure of my value to the company," he says, "that my secretary was earning eighty dollars a week." He spent the whole of the nineteen-sixties in New York, with the exception of ten months, which he spent in Mannheim, Germany, at the request of John F. Kennedy. The Soviets had built the Berlin Wall, and Woods, along with a lot of other national guardsmen, was sent to Germany, " . . . to do God knows what," as he puts it. What he did, he says, was " . . . fly a two-and-a-half-ton truck up and down the autobahn." He notes that the truck was all he flew in the Air Force.

At the end of the sixties, he moved to London and worked there for three years in various advertising agencies. In early 1973, he decided that the time had come for him to write the novel he had been thinking about since the age of ten. He moved to Ireland, where some friends found him a small flat in the stable yard of a castle in south County Galway, and he supported himself by working two days a week for a Dublin ad agency, while he worked on the novel. Then, about a hundred pages into the book, he discovered sailing, and " . . . everything went to hell. All I did was sail."

After a couple of years of this his grandfather died, leaving him, " . . . just enough money to get into debt for a boat," and he decided to compete in the 1976 Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR). Since his previous sailing experience consisted of, " . . . racing a ten-foot plywood dingy on Sunday afternoons against small children, losing regularly," he spent eighteen months learning more about sailing and celestial navigation while his boat was being built at a yard in Cork. He moved to a nearby gamekeeper's cottage on a big estate, up the Owenboy River from Cork Harbor, to be near the boatyard.

The race began at Plymouth England in June of '76. He completed his passage to Newport, Rhode Island in forty-five days, finishing in the middle of the fleet, which was not bad since his boat was one of the smallest in the fleet. How did he manage being entirely alone for six weeks at sea? "The company was good," he says.

The next couple of years were spent in Georgia, writing two non-fiction books: Blue Water, Green Skipper was an account of his Irish experience and the transatlantic race, and A Romantic's Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland, was a travel book, done on a whim. He also did some more sailing. In August of 1979 he competed, on a friend's yacht, in the tragic Fastnet Race of 1979, which was struck by a huge storm. Fifteen competitors and four observers lost their lives, but Stuart and his host crew finished in good order, with little damage. (The story of the '79 Fastnet Race was told in the book, Fastnet Force 10, written by a fellow crewmember of Stuart's, John Rousmaniere.) That October and November, he spent skippering his friend's yacht back across the Atlantic, with a crew of six, calling at the Azores, Madeira and the Canary Islands and finishing at Antigua, in the Caribbean.

In the meantime, the British publisher of Blue Water, Green Skipper, had sold the American rights to W.W. Norton, a New York publishing house, and they had also contracted to publish the novel, on the basis of two hundred pages and an outline, for an advance of $7500. "I was out of excuses to not finish it, and I had taken their money, so I finally had to get to work." He finished the novel and it was published in March of 1981, eight years after he had begun it. The novel was called Chiefs.

Though only 20,000 copies were printed in hardback, the book achieved a large paperback sale and was made into a six-hour television drama for CBS-TV, starring Charlton Heston, at the head of an all-star cast that included Danny Glover, Billy Dee Williams and John Goodman. The 25th anniversary of Chiefs comes in March, 2006, and W.W. Norton will publish a special commemorative replica edition of the hardcover first edition.

Chiefs established Woods as a novelist. The book won the Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America, and he was later nominated again for Palindrome. More recently he was awarded France's Prix de Literature Policiere, for Imperfect Strangers. He has since been prolific, writing thirty-one novels. His thirty-second novel, Dark Harbor, a new Stone Barrington novel, will be published on April 11, 2006. The thirty-third, Short Straw, will be published in October, 2006.

He is a licensed, instrument-rated private pilot, and currently flies a Jetprop, which is a Piper Malibu Mirage (a six-passenger, pressurized single-engine airplane) in which the piston engine has been replaced by a turboprop (a jet engine turning a propeller). He sails on other peoples' boats, owns a 28-foot power boat, and is a partner in a 77-foot antique motor yacht (Belle, which can be seen at www.woodenyachts.com), built in 1929 and recently restored to like-new condition.

He is a born-again bachelor who shares his life with a Labrador Retriever puppy named Fred (like all his dogs) and lives in Key West, Florida, on Mount Desert Island, in Maine, and in New York City.

About the Author: Versatility and ability to portray a variety of characters over four decades on stage, screen, and television have made Tony Roberts one of the busiest actors in America. He has appeared in dozens and dozens of films including Stardust Memories, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, and Annie Hall. A Tony nominee, his credits include Sugar, Don't Drink the Water, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Victor/Victoria.