Seduced

August 22, 2016
Early in bestseller White’s suspenseful fourth Hannah Smith novel (after 2014’s Haunted), the Florida fishing guide has to deal with the death of 80-year-old Harney Chatham, a former Florida lieutenant governor, in the arms (and bed) of her mother, Loretta. Smith reluctantly agrees to help the governor’s chauffeur, Reggie, move Chatham’s body to a more respectable place to die, the Chatham estate. Her involvement puts Smith at odds with Chatham’s widow, Lonnie, and introduces her to Chatham’s handsome grove manager, Kermit Bigalow, whose comments on the blight ravaging Florida’s oranges propel Smith on a high-stakes hunt for an ancient orange tree, whose fruit might be disease resistant, in a remote, tangled mangrove area called Choking Creek. There she encounters the giant pythons that are decimating Florida’s native animals, as well as lethal human snakes trying to beat her to the prize tree. White smoothly infuses an intriguing plot with timely environmental issues. Author tour. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

Sanibel fishing guide/private eye Hannah Smith confronts a ghost from her mother's colorful past and an even more primeval threat to Florida citrus.The ghost is that of Harney Chatham, the state's former lieutenant governor, who was certainly alive when he entered Loretta Smith's bedroom to continue his decadeslong affair with her but died before he could tuck in his shirt again. Reggie, the chauffeur who seems to know where all the bodies are buried, enlists Hannah's unwilling help in avoiding a scandal by moving the corpse to the Salt Creek Gun Club, a place so closely associated with Chatham that it would be a perfect spot for his reported death if Hannah (Haunted, 2014, etc.) and Reggie didn't run into Kermit Bigalow, who manages the club's orange groves, and Lonnie Chatham, the wife who doesn't know she's now a widow. Hannah, who never wanted anything to do with her mother's longtime lover, now finds herself committed to a series of awkward lies and to responding, through her even more unwelcome new connections to Kermit and Lonnie, to a statewide disaster that's already threatened her own modest grove: a mysterious ailment that's stricken orange trees throughout the Sunshine State. The only remedy, it seems, are some pre-Columbian trees growing deep in a mangrove swamp that Kermit, working with a process he hopes to patent, can use to bring new hope to the beleaguered orange crop. Even to enter that swamp is an ordeal; once inside, Hannah must contend with some formidable adversaries, some of them human. Despite the disjunction between the sharply drawn threats and the heroine's modest detective skills, her fourth outing may be her best to date, with a particularly effective climactic sequence that knots together every menace, and every sorrow, she faces. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2016
It's not often that the bad guy turns out to be botanical, but in the latest Hannah Smith mystery (following Haunted, 2014), citrus greening disease is at the root of the fishing guide's problems. Well, that and the fact that Florida's former lieutenant governor just died in Hannah's mother's bed. When Hannah meets the man who had been hired to manage the lieutenant governor's orange groves, sparks fly. Kermit Bigalow is unhappily married and makes no secret of his attraction to Hannah. She struggles to keep their relationship platonic (there are still unresolved relationship issues between Hannah and Doc Ford, star of White's other Sanibel Islandset series) as she takes Bigalow deep into the Everglades to find some centuries-old trees whose immunity to disease may be the key to saving the state's citrus crops. Fans of mysteries that show an appreciation of the great outdoors will love this gun-toting, plane-flying, boat-living heroine.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2016

A fishing guide (like her creator) and part-time investigator (what you'd expect from the author of the Doc Ford series), strong and striding Floridian Hannah Smith has an unusual case. To rescue Florida's withering orange trees, she's tasked with finding samples of the original root stock planted by the Spanish conquistadors. Alas, other folks would kill for the juicy gold those roots promise. Note that Piper Perabo is developing a Hannah Smith series for television.

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