Bone Deep (A Doc Ford Novel)
*Starred Review* There’s not a lot Doc Ford hasn’t done in the Florida wild, and there aren’t many predators he hasn’t squared off against, but up until now, he’s never done any bone hunting, and he’s never tangled with an angry elephant. That changes in this twenty-first installment in the series, which has lately become a staple on the New York Times best-seller list. It starts, as so many of Ford’s adventures do, with his hippie guru pal Tomlinson, who hooks Doc up with a Crow Indian from Montana called Dunk, who is in Florida searching for an ancient Native American artifact believed to be in the state’s legendary Bone Valley, where, millennia ago, mastodons and other pre-Columbian creatures roamed. Bone hunting is largely confined to a group of flourishing but distinctly unfriendly black marketers, making Doc’s attempt to help Dunk more than a little perilous. Complicating matters further is the location of the deep pond where the fossils are thought to be: on land owned by a phosphate miner who isn’t likely to share. White keeps the action churning forward as Doc encounters both human and animal foes (don’t forget that elephant), but the real interest here is the archaeological backdrop. Masterfully seeding the plot with information on Florida’s ancient natural history—and its contemporary environmental challenges—White delivers a novel that perfectly blends story and landscape. We often say that fine nonfiction has the narrative drive of a good thriller, but we rarely have occasion to say that a fine thriller has all the mind-boggling fascination of compelling nonfiction. White gives us that opportunity here.      HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY:    Doc Ford has become a literary institution, with his own restaurant on Sanibel Island and now with a CBS television series in production. All that and a cracking good story will lift Ford’s latest to White’s familiar perch on best-seller lists. --Bill Ott