Maybe that's why reading his Doc Ford crime novels always feels like listening to an old salt tell a whopper.

Ford, introduced 14 books ago in 'Sanibel Flats' (1990), is a retired intelligence agency hit man trying to make a living as a marine biologist. But try as he might, he can never seem to leave his past behind. In each novel, this improbable character reluctantly gets mixed up in an unlikely and perilous adventure.

In 'Hunter's Moon,' White has outdone himself the plot so far-fetched that it is suitable only for readers with a highly evolved ability to suspend disbelief.

The wife of a former American president is dead, killed when her plane crashed during a humanitarian flight to deliver medical supplies to Central America. The ex-president is sure it was not an accident and knows who was responsible. He wants revenge, and he's in a hurry to get it because he's dying of leukemia.

Naturally, he turns to Doc Ford.

Ford helps the ex-president shake his Secret Service detail and sneak out of the country. With Ford's best buddy, an aging hippie named Tomlinson, lending a hand, they sail and fly to their destination in a restive area of the isthmus of Panama.

There, the story gets wilder as White introduces us to a rebel leader, obnoxious American TV news reporters and Islamic terrorists while pumping up the action with a series of explosions and gun battles.

The villain Ford and the ex-president are hunting is a serial killer whose face is disfigured with burns. The character is recycled from an earlier novel in which he tried to kill Ford's son, whose mother is the widow of a Latin drug lord. But that's another story.

Sure, it's all wildly unlikely, although no more so than TV's popular '24,' but if you can swallow the premise, 'Hunter's Moon' is another rip-snorting Doc Ford page turner. That's why White is such a hot writer these days, his last Doc Ford novel, 'Dark Light,' reaching #17 on The New York Times best seller list.

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