This book could have used a little editing as far as details are concerned. The whole island was supposed to be without power due to a jamming device, so that there was no electricity of any kind, nor phones or computers, yet at one point the protagonist is blinded by a spotlight? And at one p...
Government agent-turned-marine biologist Doc Ford sails an endless sea of questions when he agrees to investigate a death from the past. Years ago, off Florida’s Gulf Coast, a teenaged girl found an ancient gold medallion. Then, she began having nightmares. Then she was found hanging from a tree....
Piece of shit. Why?•tHe consistently describes places and things like this: “Panama is among the most beautiful countries in the world. This was the most beautiful section of Panama.” WTF•tHhe loves using superlatives.•tAll of the following occurs within the first 4 pages: “there was a chance I’d...
Stayed up until 4am to finish this book, not because it was great but because it was so dry, I worried that if I stopped, I might not get motivated to pick it up again. The summary on the jacket seems interesting enough, in that a biologist, Doc Ford, is asked to meet with a fellow biologist who ...
Doc Ford returns to his stilt house on Dinkin's Bay to find an old friend and one-time lover waiting for him. Her real-estate developer husband has disappeared and been pronounced dead, and she's sure there's worse to follow-and she's right. Following the trail, Ford ends up deep in the Everglade...
Doc Ford is a Marine Biologist working/vacationing on Guava Key. He has been noticing to women pass his house every day regular as clock work and today the same. He takes off on his daily run when he see the women at their usual stopping place at the end of a pier where they stop to watch the sun...
It starts out as a fun excursion for four divers off the Florida coast. Two days later only one is found alive-naked atop a light tower in the Gulf of Mexico. What happened during those 48 hours? Doc Ford thinks he's prepared for the truth. He isn't.
When solitary marine biologist Doc Ford focused his telescope on the woman in the white boat, he didn't know his life was about to be capsized: that his conniving uncle Tucker Gatrell would discover the Fountain of Youth, that The National Enquirer would write about it, and that the law would bea...
Marine biologist and former secret operative Doc Ford is lazily poling his skiff along Southwest Florida's flat copper sea in search of sea anemones, when he runs into the body of the most hated man on Sanibel Island-Marvin Rios.And when the Island's simplest and sweetest resident is arrested for...
It was more like a tent made of metal screens, with a floor and roof of tin, hidden in the mangroves not far from the lab. “In the eighteen hundreds,” Ford explained, “a guy named Faraday proved that electromagnetic waves flow around conductive surfaces, not through them. ...
White fence, gray horse. Conspicuous on a landscape of hills and winter oaks. At dusk, in January, rural Long Island was as colorless as a woodcut on parchment. The horse had been shot, maybe while jumping the fence, maybe as he touched down. It was possible that Will Chaser had been aboard. The ...
Wars thirteen Hawker spent the next three days performing the innocent ceremonies of a man vacationing in California. He was being followed. And he damn well knew it. Hawker dutifully put in some dull afternoons as a tourist. His only satisfaction was in knowing that Flaherty would find it even m...
The west coast of Florida was losing its daylight, and a dusk chill blew off the bay. He set water to boiling for tea and stared at the phone, willing it to ring. He was eager to receive the call from his Mafioso friend, Louis Brancacci. When the phone didn’t oblige, he stripped his clothes off a...
The vigilante carried on a running gun-battle with soldiers. More than once he thought of abandoning the vehicle and the woman and striking out into the jungle alone. Instead he clung stubbornly to the wheel with his left hand while holding the Uzi in his right. What had looked to be an opening i...
He was in the middle of a dinner party, he said. Could I call back another time? There was New Age music playing in the background. It sounded tribal: tom-toms and chanting and wind chimes only slightly softer than the conversational drone of people making polite conversation. I could picture the...
The four guys in the safari suits had been getting progressively drunker—and louder. And they had been giving Stella, the pretty, worn waitress, a hard time. Hervey didn’t seem to notice. He seemed caught up in what Grafton had told him about the inevitable death of the Everglades. I remembered t...
As far as I knew, all she’d done was entrust me with the truth. If that was her crime, the truth had a heavy price on this island. Fabron had the woman over his shoulder, carrying her toward the rim of the cliff that jutted out over the sea. She was rolled into a section of carpet, like a mummy. ...
The man claimed to be on the trail of artifacts stolen from Crow tribal land in Montana. “Stone carvings about yay high,” he said, holding his fingers apart. “They didn’t come from Bone Valley, but Florida is where a lot of tribal stuff ends up.” My...
He got the address from telephone information, but the address meant nothing to him. Rural Route #7, Pahrump, Nevada. Where in the hell was Pahrump, Nevada? He decided Barbara Blaine might be able to help. He picked up the phone to call her, then reasoned it might be better to see her face-to-fac...
Not human—or so I believed. I figured a hawk had snatched something warm and furry that, in its death throes, was alerting its kindred to hide. Rabbits can rival operatic sopranos in volume. I had heard them often enough with Jake, who liked hunting in the Everglades. I lo...
The deafening, ear-ringing shock of sound. The stink of cordite. The sputtering sound that was burning flesh. It all came back to him: that time in Ireland … that time when he was four … that time his mother and sisters died. But Hawker wasn’t a boy now. Now he could do something about it. He jum...
He was surprised to see the lights in Brigitte Mildemar’s apartment still on. It troubled him. He had met the woman only briefly, but the impression she gave was strong and sure. There was nothing about her that suggested the insomniac neurotic. Hawker switched on the van’s interior lights and lo...
NICK BURNS SAID. “I can see that Fontana hasn’t told you much about his family.” “We haven’t had a lot of time to get to know each other,” Sierra said, choosing her words cautiously. “Ours was what you might call a whirlwind courtship. As I recall, he said something about not having any family.” ...
Then there was a bone-jarring crash much harder than what Hawker was prepared for. “Fire!” The scream of the young pilot yanked the vigilante from the gauzy twilight world of near-unconsciousness. The entire back section of the helicopter was ablaze with withering white flames. Hawker found his s...
By ten P.M., they were boarding a beat-up old fertilizer freighter that was registered in Monrovia, Liberia, a ship named Repatriate. For the last six or seven years, when the cops or the Nicaraguan military were really on his ass, Lourdes hopped a freighter. Didn’t matter where it went. Pay cash...
At sunset, he sat in the bar of La Terraza and enjoyed Cuban baseball on a TV with an antenna made of aluminum foil. It was the end of a busy day that wasn’t done yet. After giving so much baseball gear away, everyone recognized him on sight—not good. He’d felt uneasy padd...
Chapter One The woman who met him at the Fort George Hotel in Belize City, Belize, Central America, told him that she was a whore. She said it with a toss of her head, a quick, penetrating glare of contempt, an expression of aloof indifference that effectively communicated that she didn’t give a ...
He was mistaken. Detective Claramae Riddock sat at the table next to Hawker, yet she insisted on staying stern, aloof, and businesslike, a million miles away. Hawker found it all the more troubling because the physical attraction he felt for her had increased rather than lessened. Sitting so clos...
Why else would he be in such a hurry? As Emily stretched and yawned, I turned my wrist to see the glowing numerals of my Chronofighter watch. It was still early, only 9:30 p.m. “The house is shaking again,” she joked. “My imagination?” I leaned to kiss the woman’s cheek, then behind her ear, feel...
Especially for Hawker, who was no horseman. Twice on the narrow dirt road to Williams’s estate fast trucks had passed them but paid them no mind. The horses were disguises in and of themselves. To people in the trucks the twelve men on horseback probably just looked like wranglers from Ranch #4. ...
Below me, purple sea fans stood out black against the white sand depths. I didn’t need a mask. In the SEALS I had become more fish than man. I took a good deep bite of summer air, then noiselessly swam beneath my boat to the stern of Billy Mack’s. As I had guessed, the prop was gone, the drivesha...
I was several strides away. It was too late for me to duck beneath the barrel, so I threw up my hands—in protest, not surrender—and yelled, “Stop shooting! Use your brain!” My attention was on the truck as I continued running. I juked past Perry, seeing the black Dodge still accelerating as it lu...
Jeth Nicholes's boat was not among them. He wrote: "T = tide; W -= wind; R = resistance; L = lag; U = unknowns. TW, - TW2 + - 2[L]+-U x R = X." He puzzled over the formula for several minutes, then carefully erased it, as unsure that resistance factors could be computed as he was certain there we...
Tomlinson, Jeth, Dieter, and his secretary were below. It was late, nearly midnight, so they had probably drifted off to the fore or aft staterooms to bed. Or maybe they were still in the air-conditioned salon playing liars poker on the octagonal, teak dining room table. Or watching a video in t...
Pendergast, owner of the community's three McDonald's restaurants. At slightly after 9:00 P.M., Mr. Pendergast notified the department that he had received an anonymous inquiry that had left him uneasy. "A man just called saying he had heard great things about my son's favorite horse and said he ...
Cwong’s shipment would be delivered two days late. Hawker got the message on the portable UHF radio the agency had provided. He got the message in simple code during his first check-in time. He called someone—he didn’t know who, or where—at 7 A.M. and 7 P.M. every day. Since Harper had wanted to ...
Dan comes from Old Florida waterman stock, a fourth-generation fishing guide, when he’s not flying charters, and he’s as solid and smart as they come.It didn’t matter that Futch had convinced me there was a statistical chance the torpedo bombers had disappeared in the Gulf or the Everglades, not ...