Bone Deep

January 27, 2014
The current controversy over phosphate mining provides the backdrop for bestseller White’s solid 21st Doc Ford novel (after 2013’s Night Moves). The marine biologist and former government operative receives a visit from Duncan “Dunk” Fallsdown, a Crow Indian from Montana, at his home in Sanibel Island, Fla. Dunk is searching for two black soapstone carvings that disappeared from tribal lands almost 60 years earlier. Doc’s sidekick, Tomlinson, is behind Dunk’s visit, and likewise behind the trio’s eventual visit to Albright Key, home of phosphate magnate Leland Albright. Leland gives Doc a lesson in the relationship between phosphate mining and fossil hunting, while the others party with Leland’s wife and twin daughters. A descent into the world of overzealous and unethical fossil collectors leads to a boat-napping, stolen artifacts, and increasingly dire threats from a mentally disturbed and physically disfigured biker. As usual, White does a fine job detailing Florida’s unique history and geography, though this isn’t one of Doc’s most suspenseful adventures. Author tour. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

March 1, 2014
A search for a pair of stone carvings stolen from Crow tribal lands in Montana leads Dr. Marion Ford and his pal Tomlinson to another round of wild and woolly adventures. Although the Charmstones in question were stolen years ago, Duncan Fallsdown, who's come to Sanibel Island to ask Tomlinson's help in finding them, is suddenly in a hurry to show them to his aunt Rachel before her pancreatic cancer kills her. Because the signs point to Florida's Bone Valley, Tomlinson asks Doc Ford to get permission from wealthy Leland Albright, heir to his grandfather's phosphate mines, to search for them there. No sooner has Doc caught a whiff of Albright's dysfunctional family--his fashion model bride, Ava, the twin daughters she's grown oddly close to, and Owen Hall, the stepson his second wife left him--than the trail of the Charmstones leads to the home of Finn Tovar, a notoriously violent relics collector who's just died of a brain tumor. Doc unexpectedly recovers one of the carvings when he turns the tables on Deon Killip, a thief who's hijacked his boat for a getaway, and finds it in his bag. Unfortunately, possession of the carving comes at a high price, since Quirt Reno, a psychotic biker with a bionic arm, is so determined to recover it for himself that he makes all sorts of wild threats, some of which he actually carries out. In Doc's 21st adventure (Night Moves, 2013, etc.), promising characters get submerged in a colorful treasure hunt whose participants are at odds in not-very-interesting ways. When Doc reveals the identity of the malefactor behind the psycho biker, readers realize it doesn't much matter.

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Starred review from February 15, 2014
There's not a lot Doc Ford hasn't done in the Florida wild, and there aren't many predators he hasn't squared off against, but up until now, he's never done any bone hunting, and he's never tangled with an angry elephant. That changes in this twenty-first installment in the series, which has lately become a staple on the New York Times best-seller list. It starts, as so many of Ford's adventures do, with his hippie guru pal Tomlinson, who hooks Doc up with a Crow Indian from Montana called Dunk, who is in Florida searching for an ancient Native American artifact believed to be in the state's legendary Bone Valley, where, millennia ago, mastodons and other pre-Columbian creatures roamed. Bone hunting is largely confined to a group of flourishing but distinctly unfriendly black marketers, making Doc's attempt to help Dunk more than a little perilous. Complicating matters further is the location of the deep pond where the fossils are thought to be: on land owned by a phosphate miner who isn't likely to share. White keeps the action churning forward as Doc encounters both human and animal foes (don't forget that elephant), but the real interest here is the archaeological backdrop. Masterfully seeding the plot with information on Florida's ancient natural historyand its contemporary environmental challengesWhite delivers a novel that perfectly blends story and landscape. We often say that fine nonfiction has the narrative drive of a good thriller, but we rarely have occasion to say that a fine thriller has all the mind-boggling fascination of compelling nonfiction. White gives us that opportunity here. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Doc Ford has become a literary institution, with his own restaurant on Sanibel Island and now with a CBS television series in production. All that and a cracking good story will lift Ford's latest to White's familiar perch on best-seller lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2013

When a stone fetish disappears from a Crow Indian tribe, Doc Ford finds himself in Florida's infamous Bone Valley, investigating both murderous black marketeers and the ruthless owners of a multi-billion-dollar strip-mining phosphate firm. White knows the territory well.

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