Amazon.com (ISBN 0399142428, Hardcover)

Randy Wayne White--try saying that three times, fast--had everybody shouting about a new Travis McGee with 1996's Captiva. But White's marine biologist Doc Ford is a much more complicated character than the late, great John D. MacDonald's muscular bounty hunter. For one thing, Ford has a shadowy political past--which explains why he's reluctant to race down to Havana to bail out his chemically-abusive friend Tomlinson when his boat is impounded under suspicious circumstances. "By most definitions it was a nightmare, but to me it was simply a sleeping revisitation of a thing I had done, a thing that I loathed," says Doc--planting the seeds of a revelation about his past and showing off the kind of writing that makes his new book so compulsively readable.