From Publishers Weekly
Fans of the Florida Gulf Coast marine biologist Doc Ford, White's swashbuckling Travis McGee-esque hero, will applaud this ninth Ford suspense novel (after Shark River), though the literati will likely complain that White continues to fall just short of his near-mythic forerunner, genius storyteller John D. McDonald. In this latest tale, based on a real-life 1994 incident, a boat of scuba divers sinks at a dive site off of Marco Island. When a woman who works in his lab turns up among the missing, Doc jumps into the investigation (though not before he takes time out for an amiable menage-a-trois with two local sirens). The accident's apparent lone survivor, a sexy redheaded Sarasota attorney who swam four miles to the safety of a beacon buoy, confides to Doc that she saw her three companions taken aboard a foul-smelling shrimp boat. Ex-covert agent Doc calls on highly placed government pals to retrieve photos from a surveillance satellite, and the high-resolution images not only confirm the rescue but identify the boat owners as having a history of running drugs and smuggling illegal aliens. Accompanied by the dazzling survivor, Doc tracks the villains to Cartagena, Colombia, where he mounts an operation to free the divers, whom they suspect are about to be sold into prostitution. While this isn't the strongest of the Doc Ford escapades there's some sloppy plotting and gimmicky narrative twists it's plenty entertaining, and White's ironic touches will have fans shouting "encore."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
"We like small, brave people who find small, brave ways to endure and achieve." So says Doc Ford, marine biologist, about his fellow boat people at Dinkin's Bay Marina on Sanibel Island. Ford himself is plenty brave but only wishes he was small. In fact, he's a former dirty-tricks expert for the CIA who gamely tries to live a quiet life. This time the trouble comes when one of his marina pals is lost at sea during a diving trip off the Florida's Gulf Coast. With the help of the sole survivor, Ford attempts to learn what really happened after the divers' boat went down. To get the answers he needs, Ford must return to Colombia, scene of his former CIA dirty doings. White sticks closely to formula in this series: a small, brave person gets in trouble, and Ford, reluctantly shrugging off his Clark Kent disguise, does whatever it takes to rescue the imperiled soul, realizing in the process that violence still attracts him. Formula, yes, but White enlivens it with crisp action, thoughtful reflections on human relations, and some of the best writing about the sea by anyone in or out of the crime-fiction genre.
Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
