Deceived (Hannah Smith)

RANDY WAYNE WHITE is the author of twenty Doc Ford novels, most recently Night Moves; the Hannah Smith novel Gone; and four collections of nonfiction. He lives on Sanibel Island, Florida, where he was a light-tackle fishing guide for many years.

*Starred Review* Introduced in Gone (2012), fishing guide and sometime PI Hannah Smith returns, and her plate is full. Her willful and sometimes flaky mother is driving her crazy, and Hannah has decided that she’s in love with Doc Ford, star of White’s other series. But Doc takes off unexpectedly for Venezuela, and Hannah’s life becomes far dicier: a bogus charity that is scamming senior citizens is really a front for a real-estate-development scheme that could wipe out Hannah’s tiny home town, and the people behind the scheme are utterly ruthless. Strong-willed and tough-minded, Hannah is also suspicious of just about everyone she encounters, and some of these suspicions function as red herrings. Bogus charities and rapacious real-estate developers are as quintessentially Florida as orange juice, but White also tosses in other Florida verities, including willful destruction of ecological and anthropological treasures, industrial-scale Medicare fraud, and the heyday of Florida drug smuggling and its tragic impact on thousands of Floridians. But the reliance on familiar themes in Florida crime fiction is no quibble; Hannah brings a fresh perspective to White’s much-loved southwest Florida world. --Thomas Gaughan