This is book 22 of the "Stone Barrington" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

The library has a weird enough set of these, and not all in one place, that I'm reading them in random order, but that's not working as well as it might I suspect.

This one seems to have two threads, unrelated so far; one is the investigation of an old murder/suicide (it's been ruled so far) a while ago, in D.C. and at the direction of the White House (this is the period when Will Lee is President and his wife Katie is CIA director).

(I'm sure no particular reference is intended by naming a president "Willy". But in fact it doesn't seem to be anti-Lee, rather the opposite.)

The other is Todd Bacon chasing down Teddy Fay, after a peace treaty has been agreed with the director of the agency. He's just shot Teddy's girl, "accidentally" I suppose but by being really stupid trying to be a sniper. He's supposed to be technically competent and his previous history has been in field work, but he completely fucks it up. First he takes a shot to check the sight alignment of his rifle in his final position with the subject present. The author is helping so the subject doesn't hear it (and don't tell me about "silencers", especially on sniper rifles for use at a significant distance), but geeze. He takes this shot through a window, which makes some deflection on the first bullet very likely. And then he takes his shot when Teddy and Lauren are kissing briefly over dinner, i.e. when they won't be holding still for long and they're very close together. It's clear from his reaction to realizing he's hit Lauren and not Teddy that it wasn't what he wanted, but why, then, did he take such a high-risk shot? Wait a few seconds! Idiot. (I'm not absolutely sure that Todd isn't in fact the idiot; it's possible that Woods knows this was stupid. If so, it'll be made clear later. And it isn't.)

Oh my; and they let Shelly Bach get away at the end, too (the FBI serial killer actually responsible for most of the original mess). Saved for future excitement!