Hannah Smith Books in Order

Hannah Smith steps into the same Gulf Coast world as Doc Ford but brings a different voice and point of view. She is a tall, no nonsense Florida fishing guide who inherits a tiny investigation business from a relative, and discovers she has a knack for untangling other people's messes.

Hannah lives in the fictional town of Sulfur Wells and runs a flats boat as Captain Hannah to pay the bills. Clients come to her for tarpon and snook, but neighbors come with quieter worries, a missing girl, a pushy developer, a slick stranger with a deal that sounds too good. She is rooted in the local history in a way few characters are. White bases her on real women from his own Florida family and on the historical Hannah Smiths who chopped wood, drove ox carts across the Everglades, and kept small communities alive.

The cases she takes blend present day crime with layers of Florida's past. In Gone she hunts for a young woman who vanishes into the orbit of a dangerous man. Deceived ties an old smuggling era murder to a fraudulent museum project that threatens to wipe out her entire village. Haunted spins off from an old coastal house linked to Civil War violence and rumored ghosts. Seduced mixes citrus blight, buried orange groves from the age of conquistadors, and a long ago killing.

Compared with the Doc Ford books, the Hannah Smith novels stay closer to home. The stakes are often personal, land grabs, family secrets, small town power games that turn lethal. Hannah knows the creeks and back roads, the politics of church committees and fishing docks, and she moves through that world in a beat up pickup and a poling skiff rather than on covert jets. That intimacy makes the threats feel sharper.

Hannah appears in the Doc Ford series as well, but here she is firmly at the center. She is not interested in being anyone's sidekick. She is practical, stubborn, occasionally sarcastic, and loyal to a fault, especially when it comes to her mother and to the friends who crew her boat and watch her back. White lets her voice carry long stretches of the narrative in an easy, first person style.

If you like crime fiction that leans on character, sense of place, and the slow pressure of bad decisions more than on high tech gadgets, the Hannah Smith books are a good fit. They deepen the picture of Florida's Gulf Coast, showing not just the docks and bars but also women's clubs, citrus groves, and the quiet pockets where history still shapes everyday life.