Night Vision

x, [4], 351, [1] pages. Endpaper map. Author's Note. Cover has some wear and soiling. Inscribed by the author on the title page The inscription reads Robert Doc's pal Randy Wayne White Tampa. Randy Wayne White (born 1950) is an American writer of crime fiction and non-fiction adventure tales. 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. Marion "Doc" Ford, a marine biologist and ex-NSA agent, makes his home on the scenic west coast of Florida--but leaving his former dangerous life behind, where he protected his country by all means necessary, isn't that easy. Old friends asking for favors, dead bodies washing up on Dinkins Bay, diving lessons going horribly wrong . the shadowy world of Southwest Florida keeps putting Doc Ford in its crosshairs. This thrilling ongoing series by beloved Floridian author Randy Wayne White, which began with Sanibel Flats, has become something of a literary institution, with its perennial bestsellers. The remarkable novel in the Doc Ford series by New York Times' bestselling author Randy Wayne White. Doc Ford is on a collision course with death in this extraordinary novel. A lot is going on in the trailer park known as Little Guadalajara, inhabited principally by illegal laborers. The park manager is the hired gun of a financial syndicate that wants to develop the property, and he's prepared to do whatever it takes-but he can't figure out what to do about the teenage girl, the one the laborers believe has some sort of gift. When she witnesses him killing a man, though, and runs, there's nothing left to figure: He's got to find her fast and shut her up good. Her only hope for survival: a marine biologist (and sometimes more) named Doc Ford, who along with his friend Tomlinson, must undertake a search through an underground, invisible nation.and just hope he reaches her first. Derived from a Kirkus review: In his 18th appearance, Doc Ford and Joan of Arc contend with villainy on behalf of a beset 21st-century teenager. Tula Choimha-13, and as innocent as she is ourageous--has traveled to Florida from a remote mountain village in Guatamala. In search of her mother, what she finds instead is a kind of double-dyed jeopardy. Harris Squires and his girlfriend Frankie Manchon, who run the Red Citrus Mobile Home Park, and who take Tula into virtual captivity, are unabashed, black-hearted no-goods. Squires, a steroid-driven physical giant, is a drug dealer and a white-slaver, but he pales when compared to Frankie, a pernicious compound of Lucretia Borgia, Lizzie Borden and uncut malice. Neither of them see innocence as anything worth preserving, a view soon to be shared by a variety of other would-be exploiters. Still, Tula is not without friends. For starters, there's Joan of Arc. Though she died in 1431, the Maid of Orleans is in it almost nonstop, offering voice-activated contact with Tula in her time of trouble. Not only does Joan function as patron saint-someone who can be prayed to or called on for guidance in a general way-she is energetically hands-on. "Hurry," she tells her young charge when the need arises for a counter-move to forestall Frankie in an act of wickedness, "The woman's coming. Do it now!" Doc Ford, marine biologist extraordinaire, who over the course of his 18 novels has rescued enough females in distress to populate several leagues of their own, is another Tula supporter, supplying muscle and derring-do on demand. And then finally, perhaps most notably, there is i.…