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Featured Artist
June LeBell

I’m in love with a detective. He’s tall, handsome and has blue eyes and blond hair. Or, maybe it’s blue hair and blond eyes. I’m not really sure because I’ve never met him.

His name is Stone Barrington and, after he finished law school, he became an NYPD cop. But his moral structure was too high for that lofty organization and they gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He took the bar exam and now he’s a million-dollar lawyer who fights his own fights, does his own stunts, owns a town house in Manhattan and is way too sexy for his suits.

The Stone Barrington I know was born in Barnes and Noble. He was lying between the covers of a novel by Stuart Woods, an author new to me at the time. That was two months ago. Since then, Stone and I have become best friends and lovers. In fact, Stone does what every lover and best friend should do in the best of all possible worlds: he takes me from my every day life into the excitement, adventures and fantasy-lands that, in a good book come with every turn of the page.

The thing about Woods’ books is that he sucks us into his characters - - Stone, Holly, Will - - and when we read the last page, we don’t want to let go of these startlingly super people. So Woods keeps us buying more by keeping his characters, overlapping, in each book.

Woods manages to tell his stories in a way that keeps us riveted to his characters, wanting to know how they get where we know they got. In one book, Dead in the Water, I thought - - hey, I know how this ends. Right! I wound up sharing a special secret known only to me, Stone and a select few others and had such fun discovering the real truth, I cheered as I read the last page.

In or out of order, that’s writing!

You might think a 64 year old woman who’s spent most of her life performing and talking about classical music would pick classier classics than mysteries. Sure, I love biographies about musicians and chefs, historic novels and the occasional paleontological thriller. (I would have played with old bones if I hadn’t been a musician. Now I just eat them.) But most of all, I love page turners that teach me something. And Stuart Woods, along with the Kellermans, Anne Perry, Dick Francis and Tony Hillerman, have become my heroes, transporting me into worlds even Beethoven would love. (Visit June’s profile on AnythingArts.com)