Every so often you run across a book that feels like it was written just so that it could be adapted into a Major Motion Picture. White Shark is one of those books. The characters are two-dimensional on their good days, the motivations are tissue-thin, and the premise (to be charitable) pushes "suspension of disbelief" to the breaking point, but the plot zips along and the writing is brisk and vivid. Scene after scene has a distinct cinematic quality to it; if you've seen Jaws or its imitators you can set up the camera angles, work out the editing, and even write the theme music in your head.

The basic premise of White Shark is similar to Jaws and Beast: There's something nasty (and hungry) lurking off the coast, and Our Intrepid Heroes have to figure out what it is and how to stop it before it eats somebody that they actually care about. The heroes are straight out of central casting: The maverick male scientist, his tough-guy best friend, his 12-year-old son, and his colleague from the mainland . . . an attractive woman who might as well be wearing a sign reading "Incipient Love Interest." The nasty, hungry thing they're hunting is drawn with considerably more imagination. Saying more than that would give away things that Benchley goes to great lengths to conceal,