Books like Hothouse Orchid

Meh. That's pretty much my feelings toward Stuart Woods. I gave him a shot, having read three of his books now. One of them, "Chiefs", I can highly recommend. The other two I can't recommend. They suck.That may be a bit harsh, because Woods can clearly write. The man who wrote as entertaining and suspenseful a book as "Chiefs" surely has it in him to write well. Unfortunately, the two other books I have read by him, including the most recent, "Hothouse Orchid", seem to me to be Woods merely "phoning it in", as they say.Woods has several series featuring recurring characters. One of them is Stone Barrington, a lawyer. I did not like him much. i found him to be somewhat misogynistic and smarmy."Hothouse Orchid" features one of his other characters, Holly Barker. She is a former police chief who now works for the CIA. In this one, she is forced to go on extended vacation from the CIA because of her failure in capturing a former CIA agent-turned-renegade. So, she goes back to the Florida town she is from and where she used to be police chief. Amazingly, she manages to arrive at exactly the same time a serial rapist begins his rampage. On her first night, she is attacked and nearly raped, but she is saved by hikers in the nick of time. For the rest of the book, she sets out to... well, cook gourmet meals, fly her Cessna, and have sex with her new boyfriend, the ER doctor she met when she was taken to the hospital. Oh, and find out who's raping and murdering all those women in town, of course.Yeah, I wasn't too into this. Mainly because Holly doesn't seem to have much of a part. Most of the police work is actually done by the police in this, and Holly is an occasional "consultant". She's too busy having sex. She's really doing this vacation right.I've pretty much had it with Woods now, I can safely say.