Haunted

July 7, 2014
In bestseller White's pedestrian third Hannah Smith thriller (after 2013's Deceived), Bunny Tupplemeyer, a Palm Beach socialite, hires Hannah, a Florida-based fishing guide who has taken over her uncle's PI business, to look into quasi-supernatural happenings in a house on a plot of land Tupplemeyer owns but needs to offload. Smith finds clues to what's going on in a Civil Warâera journal of a great-great-uncle of hers she happens to be reading. White is at his best in the passages quoted from the journal, which are genuinely chilling. Once the action moves away from the ancient manse, though, it loses its way in the swampy, gator infested waters beyond. Like Tupplemeyer, other local residents also seem to be looking for something, including, but not limited to, buried Civil War treasures. The author doesn't seem too concerned about what the particular McGuffin of this story is, and questions hang unanswered in the novel's final pages. Author tour. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

August 1, 2014
Things are a bit slow in the fishing-guide business, so Hannah Smith dons her PI hat and is hired by a wealthy Palm Beach widow to prove there were salient facts undisclosed when she bought a piece of property years earlier. The land includes a house that may have been the sight of two murders, and the surrounding land may hide a heretofore undiscovered Civil War battleground. As it happens, Hannah is in possession of a Civil War ancestor's journal that may have insights into the battlefield history of the area. The third entry in the Hannah Smith series, by the author of the wildly popular Doc Ford novels, is very slow to unfold as Hannah sets the stage with a quirky array of characters, including a community of circus performers that winters in a nearby trailer park. Still, when things get rolling and when White sets his hook into the story of Hannah's great-great uncle and its connection to the present, the novel takes off nicely. Fans of the Doc Ford series will be pleased.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)