The Mangrove Coast (Doc Ford Series #6) » (REISSUE)

In The Mangrove Coast, the daughter of a dead war buddy calls Ford in distress. If you're ever really in trouble, his friend had written her, Ford's the one you can trust. Her mother's disappeared in South America without a trace, in the company of an unsavory companion, and her money's gone, too. Doc agrees to help, and finds himself in Colombia, then in Panama, on the trail of a man more genuinely evil than any he has ever encountered. There's more to it than that, though - a third man, whose shadowy presence brings death in its wake. For Doc, the mystery - and the danger - only deepen. In fact, solving the puzzle may turn out to be the most perilous thing of all.

Publishers Weekly

An awkward plot mars the latest entry (after North of Havana, 1997) in White's widely appealing Gulf coast of Florida series starring Doc Ford, marine biologist, former spook and reluctant detective. In the first chapter, Ford finds the body of Frank Calloway on the kitchen floor of the real estate baron's beach house. Eleven chapters later, readers return to Calloway's house to follow Ford, who decides that he'll look for the folder he'd come to see before he calls the police. The intervening chapters explain that Calloway had married--and later divorced--Gail Richardson, the widow of Ford's best friend, Bobby, who had been killed in Cambodia doing top-secret dirty work 20 years earlier. Gail and Bobby's daughter Amanda has asked Ford to find Gail, who is somewhere in South America with a man named Jackie Merlot. Ford learns that Merlot, a gross and depraved villain, has conned Gail into joining him in a rank business venture in the Canal Zone. Merlot is an arresting figure, but most of the action involving him happens so far offstage that his menace is largely wasted. And White's extended flashbacks are filled with pretentious ponderings about the human condition. From a writer whose work is usually marked by tight construction and wry dialogue, this fizzy tale is a misfire. Editor, Neil Nyren; agent Renee Wayne Golden. (Oct.)