For a signed copy: randywaynewhite/appearances-events.php Haunted rave from I Love A Mystery Newsletter that will run in September. HAUNTED by RANDY WAYNE WHITE Reviewed by Laurence Coven Haunted Randy Wayne White Putnam; Aug. 2014 Randy Wayne White has well represented The Florida School of crime and mystery for many years now. His many Doc Ford novels have become among the most popular and numerous in the genre. And it’s an established and venerable genre which sports such luminaries as Carl Hiaasen, Laurence Shames, and the legendary Charles Willeford. It is the Florida Gulf Coast which White has made his own private stomping grounds. By now he and Doc Ford know the territory as well as it can be known. Unless, perhaps, one looks at it through different eyes. And that’s exactly what White has done with the Hannah Smith novels. Haunted is the third in this new series featuring Hannah Smith, sixth generation Floridian, captain of a fishing tour chartering business and incidentally a licensed private detective. A 30 something gal who knows the lie of the land, but does she know all the lies the land can hand out. That’s the question in this startling, scary, creepy new book of White’s. And I mean “creepy” good. “Creepy”—scary. “Creepy”—can’t stop reading tantalizing, but better make sure your flashlight has good batteries so you can read safely under the covers. Hannah, and her best friend Birdie find themselves camping out in the ancient Cadence House, and on Halloween to boot. Biddy Tupplemeyer’s rich aunt has hired her niece, a sheriff’s department deputy, and Hannah to hang out in a house who has way more than its fair share of previous owners who committed suicide, gotten themselves murdered, or died in very suspicious circumstances. What the aunt wants is proof that the house is stigmatized enough that she can get out of her multi-million dollar contract to develop the land, which is a dead project because there is reason to believe a small previous unknown Civil War battle has been fought there, making the whole area off limits for any kind of development. Two tough broads who can handle themselves, right? The first bump in the night is a bit more than a bump. It’s the ceiling cracking over Birdie’s bed dropping dozens of scorpions on her head with one biting her on the neck. Fortunately they’re the big black scorpions—the better kind of scorpion. (There’s a better kind of scorpion? Who knew?) Still Birdy is freaked out and wants out. The local archeologist Theo Ivanhoff shows up. Tall and angular and arrogant and attractive and avaricious. Biddy wants to bed him, but Hannah doesn’t trust him. He’s the head (sort of) of the archaeological expedition searching out important Civil War artifacts. Hannah is sure he’s the peeping tom she saw just before the attack of the scorpions. No one else lives in these parts she affirms. Boy is she wrong. Ivanhoff shows her a whole world of tent people and trailer park folks—stashed off the banks of the narrow lazily winding Calooshatchee River whose shallow depths hold all sorts of hideous secrets and at least one enormous 12-foot gator with ruby red eyes. But at least a gator’s a gator. He might tear you apart with one enormous chomp, but at least you know what’s eating you. White takes Hannah and us through so many terrors, animal, vegetable, human, and in-between and virtually nothing is what it seems and if it is, well then it’s impossible. The tent women are nothing but harmless aging hippies applying poultices to Bertie’s bitten neck, aren’t they. And oh, the two ancient midget women are simply carnival folk wintering for the summer, and didn’t they know one of the stars of “The Wizard of Oz”? Huh? How did the “Wizard of Oz” get into this nightmare? Somehow White makes it seem quite natural, and hideous at the same time. Anyway better leave their tent, the scent of cannabis is way too powerful. Every turn in the road, every twist in the river on the surface or below the murk brings more questions and more terror. Wait there’s a hideous female shriek echoing through the canopied jungle-like swamp. Oh don’t worry it’s just a huge bird of prey swooping off with a fluffy rabbit who with his last breath his screaming out a warning to his kinfolk to beware. Phew! That’s all it is. Maybe those weird noises in the Cadence House are those Halloween-night teenagers having a raucous, party. That’s gotta be it. But White jerks the novel in a deadly and most evil direction when one of those teenage girls is found dead with her face eaten off. What creature could have done that and why? Well you will find out, perhaps to your dismay. But of course we all know that the most dangerous creature of all is “Man”. And White’s tale will not make you totally dismiss that moral absolute, but when Hannah is being stalked by a preternaturally intelligent, gigantic vicious creature who reeks of death and vengeance, and with only a flashlight, you might just question that moral imperative, especially when you realize that it’s not Hannah who has the flashlight. Oh and my favorite is the “Strangler Fig”. A murderous fig tree? Well true you’re not in much danger from it unless you stand perfectly tall and stand very still next to it for about a month—the strangler fig prefers less ambulatory victims, but just the image of a murderous fig tree is so at once hideously bizarre and simultaneously funny as hell, and that’s the power of White’s story. It’s some mutant Disneyland land that even greedy old Uncle Walt would have never dared to try for. But there is a serious theme behind all of this gothic horror. The Civil War battle, be it a small one, was real, where men slaughtered each other over perhaps ideals, or maybe just a case of beer or even some salt. No doubt they were a long way from virtuous. But 150 years later, there are a lot of human vultures trying to strip the battlefield and its dead for their own stinking greed. They have no respect for history, or discovering truth or for those who came and died there long before. They are nothing more than rapists. And just maybe that’s what has driven Mother Nature amuck. Who could blame her? HIGHLY RECOMMENDED ------Laurence Coven --------------------------------------------- Katie Grinch Assistant Director of Publicity G.P. Putnams Sons 212-366-2574 | kgrinch@penguinrandomhouse ---------------------------------------------
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 13:57:50 +0000
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