I magine hurricane winds over the Sahara Desert, preceded by a cavalry of tornadoes. Imagine dunes flattened, then resculpted. Then imagine all that at the bottom of the sea. A Category Four hurricane has swept the west coast of Florida, creating havoc, changing lives, and reshaping the ocean bottom. Well-known reefs and wrecks have been covered up-and new ones have emerged. The old woman who visits Doc Ford's lab late one night has a haunting story, of a loved one lost while rendezvousing with a German submarine off the coast of Florida sixty years earlier, of her belief that he was being blackmailed and that the storm has given her a second chance to prove his innocence by uncovering the wreck of his boat-and the truth-if only Ford would look for it. Intrigued, Ford agrees, and sets in motion a chain of events that will change his life forever. For there are other things in that wreck as well, and other men want those things, men willing to commit terrible acts to get them. And the woman herself-the woman is not what she seems. . . . Rich with passion and vivid, pungent prose, and some of the best characters found in suspense fiction today, Dark Light is a thriller of uncommon intensity. Lately, the ongoing drama in White's justly celebrated Doc Ford series, set on Florida's Sanibel Island, has come from marine biologist Ford's deal with the devil: he will continue to work as a covert government operative, assassinating bad guys around the globe, if his bosses keep their hands off his ex-hippie pal, Tomlinson, whose long-ago involvement in a '60s bombing has targeted him for retribution. This time, though, that plotline takes a rest, as Ford deals with more immediate threats: the aftereffects of a category 4 hurricane that swept across the island, leaving in its wake a lot of angry marina dwellers ("shit on by God, by nature, by government, by insurance agencies"). Among those aftereffects is the discovery of a ship long buried at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the victim of a similar hurricane in 1944. Ford is asked to restore various artifacts found on the vessel, and when one of them turns out to be a Nazi medal, a new mystery is afoot, involving an alluring older woman living in a nearby gabled mansion. White attempts to juggle a lot of storylines in this one--the Nazi angle; the 1944 hurricane; the mysterious woman; a psycho marina owner out to claim the artifacts for his own--and while he occasionally seems on the verge of losing control, he keeps all the balls in the air through the finale. Not one of the series' high-water marks, perhaps, but still a compellingly readable tale by one of this country's premier crime novelists. Bill Ott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Randy Wayne White is the author of seventeen previous Doc Ford novels and four collections of nonfiction. He lives in an old house built on an Indian mound in Pineland, Florida. Used Book in Good Condition