Night Vision

Starred review from December 20, 2010
In White's intelligent, fast-paced 18th Doc Ford thriller (after Deep Shadow), Doc's hipster friend, Tomlinson, persuades Doc to help an extraordinary 13-year-old girl, Tula Choimha, recently arrived at a Florida trailer park from Guatemala. Tula, who speaks with God and whose patron saint is Joan of Arc, is determined to find her mother and brother, who came to America months earlier but have disappeared. People who get to know Tula believe she is special, blessed, even a saint—except for the sleazy, steroid-infused trailer park landlord, Harris Squires. Fearful that the discovery of some human remains inside an alligator carcass will implicate him in a crime witnessed by Tula, the paranoid Harris kidnaps Tula and takes off. Doc sets out to rescue Tula, but standing in his way is a menacing gangbanger, Victorino, and Harris's vicious girlfriend, Frankie. White balances the sordid criminal activities with plenty of intriguing wildlife lore. The bond that Tula forms with her captor adds poignancy.

January 15, 2011

In his 18th appearance, Doc Ford (Deep Shadow, 2010, etc.) and...er...Joan of Arc contend with villainy on behalf of a beset 21st-century teenager.

Tula Choimha—13, and as innocent as she is courageous—has traveled to Florida from a remote mountain village in Guatamala. In search of her mother, what she finds instead is a kind of double-dyed jeopardy. Harris Squires and his girlfriend Frankie Manchon, who run the Red Citrus Mobile Home Park, and who take Tula into virtual captivity, are unabashed, black-hearted no-goods. Squires, a steroid-driven physical giant, is a drug dealer and a white-slaver, but he pales when compared to Frankie, a pernicious compound of Lucretia Borgia, Lizzie Borden and uncut malice. Neither of them see innocence as anything worth preserving, a view soon to be shared by a variety of other would-be exploiters. Still, Tula is not without friends. For starters, there's Joan of Arc. Though she died in 1431, the Maid of Orleans is in it almost nonstop, offering voice-activated contact with Tula in her time of trouble. Not only does Joan function as patron saint—someone who can be prayed to or called on for guidance in a general way—she is energetically hands-on. "Hurry," she tells her young charge when the need arises for a counter-move to forestall Frankie in an act of wickedness, "The woman's coming. Do it now!" Doc Ford, marine biologist extraordinaire, who over the course of his 18 novels has rescued enough females in distress to populate several leagues of their own, is another Tula supporter, supplying muscle and derring-do on demand. And then finally, perhaps most notably, there is in Tula's corner a converted monster—a case of repentant savagery tamed and redeemed by the Maid of Guatemala's indomitable goodness.

Much of the enjoyment depends on the reader's reaction to the idea of a really, really proactive saint.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 1, 2011
Trouble is brewing at a Florida trailer park populated by illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America: the parks manager, a steroid freak who dabbles in snuff movies, draws his expendable talent from the immigrant population, but hes managed to offend a drug lord, who isnt pleased that his female customers are turning up dead. Matters are further complicated when an adolescent girl, Tula, rumored to possess mystical ability, sees the manager feeding a body to his pet gator. Doc Ford, Sanibel Island marine biologist and sometime black-ops agent, is drawn into the trailer-park trauma by his longtime friend Tomlinson, the aging hippie whose own mystical inclinations have brought him into contact with Tula. When the steroid freak kidnaps Tula, Ford is forced to go full commandonight-vision goggles and allto track down the girl and dispatch the numerous bad guys. As always, White handles the action scenes superbly, writing with both precision and dramatic flair, but he gets inside the heads of his characters, too, not only Ford, the conflicted warrior, but also Tula, who sees herself as Joan of Arc, and even the steroid freak, who just may have an inner life beneath his biceps. A must for series fans. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It took Whites Doc Ford series a while to draw a mainstream audience, but the books started turning up on New York Times best-seller lists several years ago and are likely to remain there for the foreseeable future. A three-week author tour will give the charismatic White, a former fishing guide and veteran real-life adventurer, plenty of opportunity to spread the word still further.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)