Dead of Night
Randy Wayne White
Putnam, March 2008, $24.95, 384 pp.
ISBN 039915244X

Dr. Marion Ford owns Sanibel Biological which sells marine samples to schools and research laboratories around the country. He looks like a nerdy scientist but that is a cover for he is part of a deep cover operations team. Members of the group provide its agents with legitimate and mobile professions. Ford's job collecting marine samples takes him all over the world, a great cover when on an assignment.

As a favor to a friend he checks on her brother Jobe Applebee because he hasn't answered the phone for a few days. Marion sees a woman named Dasha beating and torturing Jobe. Marion chases her and her partner away but meanwhile the man commits suicide. Guinea worms crawl out of his body. A cunning criminal, Dr. Desmond Stokes is letting loose these and other types of exotics so that property values in the area will drop and he can buy prime land cheap. He seeks Jake's computer which might have the cure for the worm infestation. He wants to develop it so that the world will look at him as a savior while the clever and strong Dasha has orders to eliminate Ford who has the computer files and knows who is behind the loosening of the poisonous exotics on an unsuspecting state.

Randy Wayne White has written a high-powered, bio-terror thriller. The action starts during the first chapter and picks up speed, taking the reader on a roller coaster ride full of chilling terror. In the wrong hands, bio-terrorists can devastate an area and there is little anyone can do to stop them until after the mission is accomplished and the results become known. This is a very scary novel because it is based on a realistic premise, one that people can't guard against. DEAD OF NIGHT is a scintillating action adventure thriller.

Harriet Klausner