The Mangrove Coast

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1998. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Michael Price (Author photograph). [12], 290, [2] pages. DJ has an autographed copy sticker on the front. Signed by the author above his name on the title page. Minor top edge soiling. Randy Wayne White (born 1950) is an American writer of crime fiction and nonfiction adventure tales. After graduating in 1968, he spent time in travel before settling in Southwest Florida in 1972. After "traveling" for five years after high school, White worked for the Fort Myers News-Press for four years during which time he obtained a captain's license. He then bought a used charter boat and operated as a light-tackle fishing guide at the Tarpon Bay Marina on Sanibel Island for thirteen years. He has written New York Times best-selling novels and has received awards for his fiction and a television documentary. He is best known for his series of crime novels featuring the retired NSA agent Doc Ford, a marine biologist living on the Gulf Coast of southern Florida. White has contributed material on a variety of topics to numerous magazines and has lectured across the United States. A resident of Southwest Florida since 1972, he lives on Sanibel Island, where he is active in South Florida civic affairs and owns the restaurant Doc Ford's Sanibel Rum Bar & Grill. Florida marine biologist Doc Ford agrees to help the daughter of a dead war comrade and travels to Baja to look for the girl's mother, who disappeared in the company of an extraordinarily sinister man. Derived in part from a Publishers Weekly article--this is the latest entry in White's widely appealing Gulf coast of Florida series starring Doc Ford, marine biologist, former spook and reluctant detective. In the beginning of the novel, 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. 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. Amanda wants her mom rescued, and like the latter-day knight-errant that he is, Ford unhesitatingly accepts the mission—again aided and abetted in his quest by some of the quirky friends who have aided and abetted in the past. Soon enough he's in Cartagena, Colombia, and from there it's a short haul to Panamanian Gamboa, where he catches up with his fat but fearsome quarry. So it's Gamboa that becomes the scene of the denouement—a bloody, bittersweet denouement—that will leave Ford with one less quirky friend.