Dark Light

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From Publishers WeeklyThe 13th installment of bestseller White's aging but still solid series featuring Doc Ford (after 2005's Dead of Night) finds the retired CIA operative picking up in the aftermath of a hurricane that's ravaged the Florida coast. Hired to sift through the old wreck of a pleasure craft, the Dark Light, that's been spotted after the huge storm, Ford and his salvage team discover items inside the boat that stir deadly vengeance—Nazi artifacts. Ford runs into trouble immediately from Bern Heller, a nearby marina owner who claims his company has rights to the wreck site and doesn't hesitate employing violence to get his way. At issue, Ford soon discovers, is more than just old Lugers, war medals and a few gold bars. The real prize lies in the ownership of thousands of acres of Florida beachfront property. While the novel peaks in a typical burst of satisfying action, the plot takes too long to get underway and lacks the overall crispness of the author's best work. 80,000 first printing; author tour. (Mar. 16) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistLately, the ongoing drama in White's justly celebrated Doc Ford series, set on Florida's Sanibel Island, has come from marine biologist Ford's deal with the devil: he will continue to work as a covert government operative, assassinating bad guys around the globe, if his bosses keep their hands off his ex-hippie pal, Tomlinson, whose long-ago involvement in a '60s bombing has targeted him for retribution. This time, though, that plotline takes a rest, as Ford deals with more immediate threats: the aftereffects of a category 4 hurricane that swept across the island, leaving in its wake a lot of angry marina dwellers ("shit on by God, by nature, by government, by insurance agencies"). Among those aftereffects is the discovery of a ship long buried at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the victim of a similar hurricane in 1944. Ford is asked to restore various artifacts found on the vessel, and when one of them turns out to be a Nazi medal, a new mystery is afoot, involving an alluring older woman living in a nearby gabled mansion. White attempts to juggle a lot of storylines in this one--the Nazi angle; the 1944 hurricane; the mysterious woman; a psycho marina owner out to claim the artifacts for his own--and while he occasionally seems on the verge of losing control, he keeps all the balls in the air through the finale. Not one of the series' high-water marks, perhaps, but still a compellingly readable tale by one of this country's premier crime novelists. Bill OttCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved