"delightful Doc Ford thriller"

The Category Four hurricane struck hard on Florida's west coast especially devastating many of the Gulf islands. Doc Marian Ford sees first hand the damage to Sanibel Island with his home, marina and lab severely damaged by the intense storm and he received a deep gash from a flying object courtesy of the hurricane.

Jeth, Tomlinson and other Sanibel residents find pieces of German artifacts probably from a sunken submarine that caused havoc in the Gulf of Mexico during WWII. Not long afterward Jeth discovers the submarine.

Mildred Chestra Engle asks Doc Ford to investigate what happened to a beloved who vanished while meeting a German submarine six decades ago. Chestra wants to prove he was not a traitor only a blackmail victim. Feeling her sorrow, Doc takes on the case, but nothing soon seem real even her story or for that matter her age, which changes every time he sees her. Danger finds Doc because others like salvager Heller have differing plans for Ford's client and the submarine; no one will stand in his way to achieve them.

The prime storyline starts a bit later than usual as the key players and their motivations and the force of a category four hurricane are prefaced (though Katrina makes that level storm needing no introduction) to the reader. These subplots quickly merge into a delightful Doc Ford thriller. The marine biologist struggles with the wrongfully defined case, the enigmatic female that has Tomlinson thinking ghost while Doc kisses her when she does not look too old, and the thirst for revenge by Heller. Fans will enjoy DARK LIGHT as nothing is quite like it seems especially in the aftermath of a hurricane named Chestra.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by Harriet Klausner
Posted June 6, 2006

Summary

I magine hurricane winds over the Sahara Desert, preceded by a cavalry of tornadoes. Imagine dunes flattened, then resculpted. Then imagine all that at the bottom of the sea.

A Category Four hurricane has swept the west coast of Florida, creating havoc, changing lives, and reshaping the ocean bottom. Well-known reefs and wrecks have been covered up-and new ones have emerged. The old woman who visits Doc Ford's lab late one night has a haunting story, of a loved one lost while rendezvousing with a German submarine off the coast of Florida sixty years earlier, of her belief that he was being blackmailed and that the storm has given her a second chance to prove his innocence by uncovering the wreck of his boat-and the truth-if only Ford would look for it. Intrigued, Ford agrees, and sets in motion a chain of events that will change his life forever. For there are other things in that wreck as well, and other men want those things, men willing to commit terrible acts to get them. And the woman herself-the woman is not what she seems. . . .