Santa Fe Rules is a fast-paced mystery that is predictable and easy to see through from the very start.  Woods gives a cursory impression of the city of Santa Fe along with the surrounding areas. Both could have been shown in more detail.  The desert of the southwest is a beautiful place, but its magnificence gets barely a nod.

Wolf Willett is a movie producer who unexpectedly finds out that he has been murdered... by reading about it in the Times.  Turns out, he wasn’t really murdered; it was his wife’s ex-husband, along with his wife and his best bud, while he himself was in the Grand Canyon.   The story started to unravel from there, as there were way too many cliché’s for my taste, but it was rather amusing and easy to read and the reader was not distracted from the things that matter most in the day or two of the story line.

Woods brings in a rather interesting character named Ed Eagle, who is supposed to be a Native American Indian, but we later find out that he is Jewish, and was accepted by the Indians because he is able to play basketball (he's also gigantic). Wolf is adopted by another interesting character, a biker he met while in jail for the murders.  We learn that the wife has an identical twin sister, who comes into play through Willett grieving so deeply about his dead wife.

I am not a fan of Woods, and this book is not really any better or worse than the others I have reviewed. However, it was easier to read because he didn’t interject his political positions into it as much.  It would be a distracting read while sitting on a beach this summer, if you are into his sort of writing...