Woods was a Georgia native, entered the advertising business after college graduation and lived in England and Ireland for almost a decade.
Woods’ initial literary efforts focused on sailing and expanded to include reviews of numerous British restaurants, inns and hotels.
Woods’ prolific Barrington series features the detective-lawyer, aided by a recurring cast of supporting characters, who handles lucrative cases which his law firm otherwise would rather not be associated with.
After graduation, he enrolled in the Air National Guard, spending two months in basic training before moving to New York City, where he began a career in the advertising industry.
After three years in London, Woods decided to write a novel, based on an old family story that had been told to him when he was a child, and moved to Ireland.
[4] He moved into a converted barn on the grounds of Lough Cutra Castle near Gort, County Galway, and lived a near-solitary existence, except for spending two days a week in Dublin writing television commercials and print advertisements.
[9] For the rest of the season, he sailed around Ireland with a friend on a Snapdragon 24, and decided to compete in the 1976 Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race (OSTAR).
He ordered a Golden Shamrock-based yacht from Ron Holland, and worked with him on designing the interior suitable for single-handed racing and Woods' personal needs.
[24] Upon his return to Ireland in the late fall of 1975, Woods appeared on the Irish version of To Tell the Truth with Ron Holland and John McWilliam.
[26] Woods wrote an account of his OSTAR experience, and was introduced to Stanford Maritime, a London-based publishing house specializing in nautical books, by Ron Holland.
He persuaded his publishers to allow him to change the scope of the book, and spent the summer driving 12,000 miles around Great Britain and Ireland, writing a guidebook to country restaurants, inns, and hotels.
[30] Originally titled A Lover's Guide to the Country Inns of Britain and Ireland Woods realised married couples may feel alienated, and changed it to A Romantic's Guide ...,[29] defining a "romantic" as a person " who is susceptible to charm" in addition to The Concise Oxford Dictionary's definition of someone "given to romance, imagination ... visionary ... professing grandeur of picturesqueness or passion or irregular beauty to finish and proportion.
In 1983, Chiefs was adapted into a television miniseries of the same name, starring Charlton Heston, Danny Glover, Billy Dee Williams, Keith Carradine, Brad Davis, Stephen Collins, Paul Sorvino, Lane Smith, Paula Kelly and John Goodman, with production filming taking place in Chester, South Carolina.
[citation needed] In addition to Stone, Woods authored several other character-focused series, including Holly Barker, a retired Army major and Florida police chief recruited to become a CIA operative; Ed Eagle, a Santa Fe defense lawyer; William Henry Lee IV, a United States senator from Georgia who is elected President of the United States; and Rick Barron, a police detective who becomes a security officer and later chief of production for a Hollywood movie studio in the 1930s.
Woods has published a memoir, a travel book, and 44 novels in a 37-year career, and had 29 consecutive The New York Times best sellers in hardback.
Married to Jeanmarie (née Cooper) in January 2013, the couple lived with a Labrador retriever named Fred in Key West, Florida, on Mount Desert Island, in Maine, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.