Night Vision

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.

Trouble is brewing at a Florida trailer park populated by illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America: the park’s manager, a steroid freak who dabbles in snuff movies, draws his expendable talent from the immigrant population, but he’s managed to offend a drug lord, who isn’t 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 commando—night-vision goggles and all—to 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 White’s 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. --Bill Ott