Joe's View

Stuart Woods has been averaging more than a book a year lately, but his new one, “Kisser” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) — which will be officially published in two weeks — is a hard-to-beat mystery, heavily spiced with humor and sophistication.

The novel features my favorite Woods character, the New York cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington, who lives the (very) good life in Manhattan while solving cases involving people who can only exist in that city.

The ease with which Woods starts a story and then hooks the reader is quite amazing (a trait he shares with Lee Child, who will have a seemingly prosaic Jack Reacher moment - like ordering his morning coffee – set his hero off on an amazing adventure).

Chapter One of “Kisser” finds Stone having dinner with his NYPD pal Dino at their favorite East Side eatery, Elaine’s (I told you Stone lives the good life!).

The legendary restauranteur Elaine Kaufman makes more than a cameo appearance in the novel, which must mean Woods is a pal (but he doesn’t come off like a shameless name-dropper).

A “very beautiful woman” enters the restaurant and sits at the bar — alone.

“Who is she?,” Stone asks Elaine.

“Never saw her in here,” Elaine replies, “but you’d better hurry; she’s not gonna be alone long.”

Stone tells the woman she is too beautiful to be sitting alone at the bar and asks her to join his group.

Two pages in and we’re off on Stone’s latest case. The woman turns out to be Carrie Cox who is just about to become the star of a new Broadway musical, but she has a rich and crazy ex-husband down South who may or may not want his ex dead because of her huge divorce settlement.

Stone’s case takes us into the contemporary Broadway scene and as if that isn’t enough for a brisk 288-page mystery, our hero accepts a second job involving the art world and a poor little rich girl who is being fleeced by a cheesy Jackson Pollock imitator.

“Kisser” is one of those books you race through as quickly as you can because each new chapter brings another surprise and/or a new bed partner for Stone — one of the running jokes here is the fact that almost every woman who meets the lawyer who wants to hop into the sack with him. Woods makes the sex funny as well as enticing, so that it becomes just one more entertaining facet of this delightful mystery.

Like almost every other person in the country who has seen “Avatar” over the past two weeks, I was blown away by the beauty and the awesome technology of the James Cameron science-fiction movie.

3D has been making huge strides in recent years — even in horror pictures such as last winter’s “My Bloody Valentine” and the end-of-summer sleeper hit “Final Destination” — but nothing else comes close to the way Cameron uses the format to boost the power of his story.

The film was so clearly designed for 3D that I can’t help but wonder who will want to watch “Avatar” on DVD next year (not to mention view it on inflight screenings and pay cable this time next year). Since video now accounts for about half of the profits on any movie, Cameron’s decision to go with 3D for such an expensive project was a huge gamble.  

The power of the theatrical presentation of Cameron’s movie is a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s when the studios tried to lure TV viewers out of their homes with new technologies such as Cinerama, Cinemascope and, yes, a very primitive form of 3D.

“This is Cinerama” was never shown on TV and has never been released on video because there would be no point — the power of the travelogue resided entirely in seeing it on a giant screen (three times the standard 1950s width) and with surround sound.

The extra-wide Cinemascope pictures became TV staples in the 1960s, but in a drastically cropped form that often made them look terrible at home (it took more than 30 years to work out this problem, with the introduction of wider TV screens and the “letterbox” format that preserves the original widescreen ratio of classics like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “2001: A Space Odyssey).

The cropping of an image is an entirely different matter than turning a 3D film into a flat-screen experience, however, and I can’t imagine anyone who has seen “Avatar” in 3D wanting to see it again at home with all of the depth missing. Cameron’s movie is going to make a fortune in theaters around the world over the next few months, but until they come up with home 3D systems, the movie probably won’t have the huge DVD afterlife of other sci-fi smashes of recent years such as “The Dark Knight” and the “Spider-Man” series.