This book contains an excerpt from Dead in the Water by Stuart Woods. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the hardcover’ edition

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as %nsold and destroyed’ to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1996 by Stuart Woods All rights reserved. No part f this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publish 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 1002245299.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1996 by HarperCollins Publish

ISBN 0-06-109423-4

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Cover photo by Alexa Garbarino

First Harper Paperbacks printing: September 1997 Printed in the United States of America Visit Harper Paperbacks on the World Wide Web at http://www.harpercollins.com

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This book is for David and Lynn Kaufelt

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to every gossip columnist in the business, for giving me such good material.

I am also grateful to my editor, HarperCollins Vice President and Associate Publisher Gladys Justin Carr, and her staff, for all their hard work; and to my literary agent, Morton Janklow, his principal associate, Anne Sibbald, and all the lgeople at Janklow and Nesbit for their careful attention to my career over the years.

CHAPTER

Dinner had been wonderful—twelve around a gleaming oval table of buried walnut in a dining room a dozen stories above the light-flecked carpet of Central Park, the cooking by the chef of a famous restaurant a few blocks away, the wines from the host’s superb cellar, and the company carefully chosen by a couple who could cast a wide net. Amanda Dart felt quite at home among them.

As they moved from the table into the library next door for coffee and brandy, Amanda reflected that her presence there was as much a tribute to her position as to her personality, though she could certainly hold her own in any company. Of those present—a movie star and his gorgeous companion, a captain of industry and his dowdy wife, and a former British prime

minister, her dinner partner, among them—Amanda alone possessed the power to tell the world just who her hosts had attracted to their table, something the couple wanted very badly for the world to know. It was vulgar to drop names; Amanda Dart, queen of gossip columnists, would do the dropping for them.