Cuba Straits

January 19, 2015
Present-day Cuba is the setting of bestseller White’s timely 22nd Doc Ford thriller (after 2014’s Bone Deep). The former dictator of Masagua, “a tiny country that exported bananas and revolution,” turns to Ford for help after he temporarily “loses” Figueroa Casanova, a Cuban baseball player he smuggled into the U.S. Casanova wandered off from his St. Petersburg, Fla., motel, carrying a briefcase full of letters written by Fidel Castro to the dictator’s mistress from 1953 to 1963. Ford’s unpredictable sidekick, Tomlinson, manages to locate Casanova and decides to return him and the Castro letters to Cuba. When Ford learns that a Russian spy, among others, is after the letters, he heads to Cuba to find Tomlinson. More than one distraction diverts Ford from his mission, including investigating the legend that three American ballplayers buried their new motorcycles in Cuba the day Castro took power. White smoothly combines history, action, and colorful characters into a savory concoction easily devoured in a single sitting. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

January 15, 2015
A trove of revealing private documents, rumors concerning a political assassination, a trip to Cuba-it's either today's newspaper or Dr. Marion Ford's 22nd adventure.Even before the embargo is lifted, it's not all that hard to get Americans to travel to Cuba. Just ask Doc Ford, who agrees to go there to hunt for a missing shortstop and the briefcase he took from Ford's old frenemy Gen. Juan Simon Rivera. Doc's willing to chase after Figueroa Casanova even though he knows he's involved in something illegal-Rivera's long-running business smuggling Cuban ballplayers into the U.S.-partly because the trip offers the possibility of spotting one of the Pacific Ridley turtles native to the island. And the search is quickly successful, more or less. Ford and Sighurdhr Tomlinson find Casanova early on, but the two old friends get separated shortly thereafter, Tomlinson ending up with Figgy, Ford with the briefcase, which turns out to contain hundreds of personal letters Fidel and Raul Castro wrote to the same woman over a pivotal period in Cuba's turbulent history. Will the truth about the 1959 revolution, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the killing of JFK come to light? Not if sadistic Santeria priest Vernum Quick and his Russian handler, Anatol Kostikov, have anything to say about it. Luckily, Ford finds an unexpected ally in Sabina Esteban, whose mother sent her and her sister, Maribel, on a boat to Florida after Maribel, 13, witnessed a murder and worse. Sabina may be only 10, but she's the most resourceful little spitfire you can imagine. Cuba provides the perfect setting for White's recent fondness for episodic, hallucinatory quests (Bone Deep, 2014). The next few months' headlines will determine whether his view of contemporary Cuba is remarkably prophetic or yesterday's news.

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Starred review from February 15, 2015
Cuba and baseball have long been favorite subjects for White and his iconic series star, Doc Ford, so it's no surprise to find them combined in this twenty-second novel featuring the marine biologist, covert black-ops agent, and fair-to-middlin' catcher in Florida's senior baseball league. Ford's compatriot, the ever-wacky stoner/philosopher Tomlinson, is a ballplayer, too, a left-handed pitcher, naturally, who specializes, also naturally, in off-speed junk. Tomlinson, as series fans will know, is partially based on a real-life wacky left-hander, Bill Spaceman Lee, formerly of the Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos, who has been White's running buddy for years. The two have made several trips to Cuba, giving away baseball equipment to Cuban kids and even filming a delightful documentary called Gift of the Game, which premiered at Fenway Park. So given all that, it seems inevitable that White would eventually throw baseball and Cuba into a Doc Ford noveland a suitably wacky one. In the opening innings, Ford hooks up with an old adversary turned comrade from his active ops days, a former Cuban general now reduced to smuggling ballplayers into the U.S. and peddling what he calls HPCs, high-profile collectibles. When he arrives in Florida, the general has one of each in towan aging shortstop and a collection of letters written by Fidel Castro to his mistress in the early 1960s. The general needs Ford's help: it seems the somewhat unstable shortstop, who is holding the all-important letters, has gone missing. Gradually, we come to learn that the letters may reveal that Castro faked his supposed pre-revolution baseball career, a matter of potential scandal in Cuba where one should never, the general cautions, underestimate the power of superstition and baseball. The revelation that Fidel was not a pro-caliber pitcher (yes, another left-hander), some believe, could tarnish the reputation of the Great Leader and imperil the revolution. And what's happened to the shortstop? Well, he hooked up with Tomlinson in a sandlot game, and now he's aboard the No Mas, Tomlinson's sailboat, on his way back to Cuba, where the southpaw, loyal to the ideals of the revolution, hopes to return the letters to their owner. But wait: Ford's in his own boat, also on the way to Cuba, but he's running behind, having stopped to rescue two girls on a raft; clearly, it's time for Ford to kick his Bondian vessel into overdrive if he hopes to somehow stop the chaos he's sure Tomlinson and the shortstop will foment. What results is a bizarre midnight rompequal parts slapstick and nightmarethrough a possibly haunted cemetery (don't underestimate superstition, remember) in the company of the girls from the raft, a leftover Russian spy, a phony Santeria priest with illusions of grandeur and a taste for young girls, Castro's former mistress, two vintage motorcycles, and, of course, the ever-more-unstable shortstop and our favorite southpaw stoner. Ford is there, too, though seemingly still several steps behind everyone else. White shows a new side to his talent here, combining familiar themes and much-loved characters with a real flair for madcap adventure. Think A Midsummer Night's Dream recast as a slasher movie with baseball players. A misbegotten mess? You'd think so, but somehow it all works, sort of like the way a left-handed junkballer manages to strike out the side in the bottom of the ninth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2014

Bad news for Doc Ford. His old friend Gen. Juan Garcia, who now specializes in selling high-profile collectibles, has vanished after selling a cache of letters Fidel Castro wrote to a secret girlfriend in the early Sixties. And the buyer can't be found, either. What was in those letters?

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