Deep Blue

January 25, 2016
White’s fast-paced 23rd Doc Ford novel (after 2015’s Cuba Straits) pits the Florida wet work specialist against David Abdel Cashmere, a Chicagoan turned terrorist who features as the executioner of three hostages in several videos. Ford travels to the Yucatan, where his target is staying at a seaside resort, but things don’t go as planned. He finds his facilitator, known only as K.A.T., with one of Cashmere’s supposed victims, Winslow Shepherd, in an eighth-floor hotel room. When Ford confronts the pair, they both fall from the room’s balcony, and Ford is forced to flee back home to Sanibel Island, Fla. Cutting-edge drones appear on the island, which are controlled, he soon discovers, by Winslow’s son, Julian (aka the Black Knight of the Internet). Ford rallies his allies, chief among them Tomlinson, his “boat-bum hipster” sidekick with ESP powers, and Brazilian Vargas Diemer, a wealthy jet-setter of questionable loyalty. Lively characters, enough action for three summer blockbusters, and plenty of plot twists make this a great addition to the bestselling series. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM.

January 15, 2016
Marine biologist Marion D. Ford interrupts his endless partying at Sanibel Island long enough to get involved in another round of international counterterrorism. It's a tough job, but somebody's got to eliminate David Abdel Cashmere, failed Chicago actor-turned-homegrown terrorist, whom Doc Ford watches on a slickly edited video executing three hostages. So Ford bids farewell to his beloved Sanibel--where some secret Santa has recently taken to showering the locals with $100 bills--packs his bags for Mexico, and quickly discovers that it's a tougher job than he thought. One complication is that his encounter with Cashmere, aka Maximo Al-Amerikee, while his target is parasailing doesn't go exactly as planned. Another is that Ford's local contact, a woman he knows only as KAT, seems to be sleeping with the enemy. Still another is that the enemy is Winslow Shepherd, an Australian math professor Cashmere's supposed to have beheaded. But the biggest of all is that Ford's activities have brought him to the attention of Shepherd's son, a computer prodigy who changed his name from Julian Caesar Winslow Shepherd to Julian Solo to show what he thinks of his father. Now Julian, who's recently lost two drone aircraft in the waters off Sanibel, is determined to make Ford's life miserable, along with the lives of all his friends. A ruthless hacker can easily find ways to bring Dr. Ava Lindstrom, the veterinarian who saved the life of Ford's nameless dog after he went diving after one of those drones, close to suicide, and it's obvious that Ford and his hipster friend Tomlinson will have to return to Mexico in response to Julian's latest demands--and in hopes of neutralizing him more completely than Ford managed to do with Cashmere during his last visit. The front-loading of the major surprises makes this adventure middling among Doc Ford's recent Bond-like encounters with villains with political agendas (Cuba Straits, 2015, etc.).

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Starred review from February 1, 2016
Something is going on in White's long-running, ever-popular Doc Ford series. It's as if a screw or two has come loose from whatever keeps Ford's bifurcated life in synche's a mild-mannered marine biologist by day and a black-ops assassin by nightand now one side of his world is colliding with the other. It starts with Ford in Central America, assigned to kill an ISIS assassin; there is collateral damage, unfortunately, and soon the doc finds himself in the crosshairs of a crazed, geeky hacker right out of a Bond novel, who seems intent on ruling the world from his laptop. When Ford shoots down one of the supergeek's pet drones (a story in itself, involving another Bondian toy), the pas de deux intensifies, with supergeek taking the battle to Ford's innocent friends at Dinkin'sBay Marina.White makes particularly good use of this always-potent crime-fiction themethe knight errant who inadvertently brings trouble home to those he lovesramping up tension by transforming the marina from laidback sanctuary to imperiled target. But that's not all: in the same way that the last Ford adventure, Cuba Straits (2015), finished with a finale that was part Midsummer Night's Dream and part slasher movie, this one delivers an undersea battle that evokes both Bond and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (yes, there is a steampunk submarine, with a great white shark in the role of the giant squid). Traditionalists who prefer the earlier Fordian formula of old-school headbanging mixed with thoughtful introspection may be a bit taken aback by this injection of high-tech, grand-scale adventure, a la Matthew Reilly, but those willing to ride with the series into what promises to be an entirely new orbit will never be bored.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This twenty-third Doc Ford novel will quickly assume its reserved seat on the New York Times and most other best-seller lists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2015

In this 23rd Doc Ford novel by New York Times best-selling author White, named a Florida Literary Legend by the Florida Heritage Society, chewed-up dolphins are washing ashore at Sanibel Island, and tourists are staying away in droves, suspecting some awful creature of the deep. But Doc believes the threat is human.

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