I’ve been making the mistake recently of occasionally looking at reader reviews on Amazon when I set up the links for my blog reviews. Because of one of these lamentable lapses, I see tonight that reviews of Randy Wayne White’s Black Widow are decidedly mixed—and widely polarized. Some readers loved it. Others thought it signaled the demise of the “Doc Ford” series.

List me with the people who loved it. Approaching it as a pure escapist novel, I thought it was one of the best I’ve read recently.

I was particularly impressed with the opening. It’s a platitude (and becoming a cliché) that authors (thriller authors especially) need to grab the reader at the very beginning and keep things so tense that they can’t lose him.

In a single day and night in the first few chapters of Black Widow, Doc Ford (marine biologist and occasional government black ops agent) flies to Aruba to make a blackmail payoff on behalf of his goddaughter, Shay Money, who was guilty of certain excesses on a pre-wedding Caribbean holiday with three of her friends. Shay is engaged to an extremely wealthy and influential young man, and can’t afford a scandal. Then, instead of going to bed, he takes his boat, along with his hippie friend Tomlinson, to rescue a woman whose transmission they pick up on a short wave radio, who claims that she and her family are being attacked by sharks. This ends up involving an encounter (in the water) with hammerhead sharks. Then, again before he can get to bed, he’s attacked by a man with a gun in his own house. After handling this guy, Doc gets a call telling him that Shay has been in an auto accident, and one of her friends has attempted suicide. Then, after a hospital visit, he goes to bed with a different friend of hers.

And the next day he’s scheduled for a performance evaluation session with his government employers.

That got my attention.

The blackmailers come back for more of course, and Doc makes a trip to a very exclusive Caribbean island retreat, where a voodoo cult operates a health spa and resort which is actually a blackmail factory. He teams up with a too-good-to-be-true retired English secret agent. He gets drugged, gets beat up and imprisoned, and then kicks serious butt.

It was a lot of fun. Plenty of sex, but not explicit. Not up to the Klavan or Hunter standard, but perfect summer beach reading, in my opinion. It’s still warm down in the Bahamas, even in September.