White Cargo » (Reprint)

With several successful mystery series going at once -- the most popular featuring jet-setting cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington -- Stuart Woods more than manages to keep focused on a bestselling streak that shows no signs of slowing down.

They should have killed millionaire Wendell "Cat" Catledge, but they let him live while they sent his family and his yacht to a watery grave. They let him live knowing he could never find them in the deadly drug towns of Colombia, where they ruled as untouchable kings. Then, late one night Catledge receives a phone call—and one word launches one man's total war against a ruthless and terrifying evil.

Publishers Weekly

Despite Woods's on-site research in Colombia, this suspense tale of cocaine trafficking and kidnapping only skims the surface of the seamy drug world it purports to investigate. Wendell (``Cat'') Catledge, a self-made electronics millionaire, is yachting off the South American coast with his family when a bloody act of piracy snatches away his ``heart-stoppingly beautiful'' teenage daughter Jinx and wife Katie. They are presumed dead, but weeks later Cat gets a brief phone call and recognizes Jinx's voice. His quest for his daughter, who is now a zombie enslaved by ``the Anaconda,'' a Colombian drug baron, involves Cat with assorted CIA and narc types and with Meg Greville, a freelance TV journalist who may be KGB. Woods (Deep Lie, Chiefs) serves up a slam-bang rescue as a fitting finale, but the suspense overall is so-so and the Latinos are either faceless or stereotypically sneaky. This one reads like a lukewarm episode of Miami Vice. (August)