WHO IN HELL IS WANDA FUCA

It's not a who, it's where—the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Seattle—and its patron saint is raffish shamus Leo Waterman, whose politico father used to hang with the likes of aging mobster Tim Flood. Now Tim's granddaughter, Caroline Nobel, has got involved in something even Tim thinks smells funny, and he wants Leo to get her out of whatever it is. What can Leo do that Tim's enforcers haven't tried? Well, he can pull his decrepit drinking buddies out of the local bar they call the Zoo to follow Caroline, and in no time at all, one of them will be tortured and killed. (Evidently Caroline's environmental terrorist buddies from Save the Earth aren't so fussy about the planet's human population.) But when Leo finally catches up with Caroline and gets a closer look at the world-scale toxic dumping that's turned a local tribal reservation into a killing zone, Leo's ready to take aim instead against the dumpers—if only he can figure out who they are. The dumping scheme is nothing short of fiendish: full marks to the clever crooks. First-novelist Ford does less well, though, treating all his characters—including the allegedly unforgettable spitfire Caroline—as so many faceless floaters.