Hunter's Moon (Doc Ford) - Hardcover

White, Randy Wayne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399153705 ISBN 13: 9780399153709

Publisher: Putnam Adult, 2007

Synopsis

Doc Ford faces his greatest challenge ever, in the stunning new novel by the New York Times-bestselling writer.

Book after book, Randy Wayne White's audience and critical acclaim continue to grow. His most recent thriller, Dark Light, was "one of his brightest novels" (South Florida Sun-Sentinel), "darkly marvelous" (The Miami Herald), "a compelling, readable tale in the justly celebrated Doc Ford series by one of this country's premier crime novelists" (Booklist). With Hunter's Moon, White is ready to take another giant leap.

On a foggy, tropic October night, the full moon burning through the mist, I stopped paddling when I heard unexpected voices. Muted whispers, neither English nor Spanish, the voices of men moving in stealth. They shouldn't have been here. I shouldn't have been here. There were plausible explanations, but I didn't like any of them.

When Ford saves from assassination a controversial former president of the United States who is staying on an island off Florida's west coast, he has no idea what he's just let himself in for. J. C. Wilson knows that he has only a short time to live, and he has a full agenda. In seven days, the United States is planning a secret strike on a Central American oil-rich nation, and Wilson intends to intercede-but he'll need help from certain people. One of them is an old adversary, the former dictator of the targeted country, long since disappeared and rumored to be a recluse. Another is a former lover, a woman of considerable influence and mystery. And the third is Doc Ford . . . whether he likes it or not. . . .

Rich with passion and vivid, pungent prose and some of the best characters found in suspense fiction today, Hunter's Moon is White's most remarkable novel yet.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

The 14th Doc Ford Florida thriller (after 2006's Dark Light) from bestseller White requires more suspension of disbelief than most readers may be willing to provide. Marine biologist Ford, a shadowy figure with multiple links to the intelligence community, gets an unusual commission from Kal Wilson, a former one-term president who recently lost his wife in a mysterious plane crash. Wilson, who has a terminal illness, asks Ford's help in slipping his protective detail so that the politician can search for those he believes responsible for his wife's death. Implausibly, the psychotic serial killer who's Ford's bête noir, Praxcedes Lourdes, appears to have been involved in the attack on the former first lady, giving the covert op a personal incentive to assist Wilson. The action sequences, especially those involving Wilson, are less than convincing, and the climax is particularly far-fetched. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

White's last entry in his Doc Ford series (Dark Light, was a quasi-historical novel in which his hero, marine biologist and special-ops agent Ford, unraveled a mystery with roots in World War II. This time, though, it's back to the present, as Ford tangles with his nemesis from Tampa Burn (2004), the psychotic pyromaniac Lourdes. There's more than mano a mano going on here, though, as Lourdes is working with a group of Islamic terrorists who have a global agenda. And Ford has a new partner, too: Kal Wilson, a Clintonesque former president of the U.S., now stricken with a fatal illness, who needs Ford's help with a few clandestine items on his to-do-before-I-die list. It's a bit of an outlandish premise, to be sure, but White makes it work, drawing the former prexy into Ford's world as easily and believably as if he were just another hanger-on at Dinkins Bay Marina. There's not much kicking back, Margaritaville-style, on the agenda, however, as the lethal mix of pyro psychos, wacko right-wing Americans, and global terrorists keeps Ford on high-adrenaline full throttle from beginning to end. Yes, we'd like a bit more of the reflective character interplay that usually peppers the action in this series, but White does pure action as well as anybody in the genre, so why not just enjoy the ride? Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Putnam Adult
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0399153705
• ISBN 13: 9780399153709
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336