A Tan and Sandy Silence

The 13th installment in MacDonald's suspense series about Florida beach bum extraordinaire Travis McGee. McGee flies down to Grenada in aid of a female (naturally) friend and ends up learning some uncomfortable truths about himself. This one is redolent with the long contemplative inner monologues that MacDonald regularly uses to shine a light on the cultural and sexual mores of the time, but it's notably short on humor and long on gruesome and graphic violence that even my hard-bitten self found a bit over the top. The longer the series goes on, the less content McGee seems to be at the end of each book, even after the bad guys are vanquished. If he were a real person, I would worry about his mental health.

One of my favorites of the series. McGee's first failure of confidence in his ongoing struggle with evil, but unlike "The Green Ripper", where he shuts down emotionally in order to become a killing machine, this book shows more of the emotional fallout from his failure. This being MacDonald, the villains come to a gruesome and satisfying end, but McGee knows he can lose, perhaps a metaphor for the end of youth and the beginning of maturity.

Thoroughly depressing. While McGee isn't quite as bad to other people in this one as usual (he only tortures one woman), he is having a crisis of confidence, egged on by his buddy Meyer, that maybe he has gotten a couple of steps slower and won't be able to outdo the next person who comes to kill him. Which he just about proves throughout the book, basically forgetting to take care of himself when every reader of the book will be shouting to him to watch out. The story, such as it is, doesn't do anything to take away from the darkness. The plot is one of MacDonald's weakest, and the most pleasure from the book comes from its travelogue aspects, including a sojourn in Grenada. One of McGee's lovers may be in trouble or worse--so he sets show more out to look for her and find out what is going on with a big business deal her husband is involved in. Though McGee seems to have lost all his instincts for self-protection, he does manage to fix a bilge pump and remove a splinter. Meyer goes him one better, however, by curing four religious groupies of the crabs. And there are more dubious pleasures to be had. This ones reads as if MacDonald were making it up as he went along, and probably consuming more than a few too may Plymouth gins as he did so. show less

The usual exceptional. I feel wistful with each book I finish in this series with the knowledge that there are fewer now left to read. Regardless of the plot, each book puts me in the mind of permanent vacation in the life of the deep thinking man of modesty luxury, McGee. With each installation, McGee's homespun philosophy gets more finely tuned. It is a shame that I can't later recall with particularity the phrasing of his wisdom. Simply an excellent series and this is a great installment within the series.

A neatly gruesome and psychopathic killer is the cause of some introspection in our lovable beach bum hero. McGee stories are aimed more or less directly at male readers, but are thankfully much more than the silly, skirts 'n' guns stories that are produced by many other writers of the genre. The violence is there - in spades, for this one - but the sex is understated. Perhaps not to the extent where you could call it tasteful, but certainly not to the point of being gratuitous. One does find that McGee's succession of female friends that he needs to help out of jams to be a bit silly. But a very enjoyable story that has held up well over the years.

It was a fun read with a strong start as McGee is hooked into another mystery, and I liked the scenes in both Florida and Grenada as he unraveled what was really happening, but the cruelty of the protagonist while deceiving one of the marks put me off a bit, and I thought the ending didn't quite deliver.

There are better McDonald books but it is still quite an adventure. The protagonist doesn't suffer fools, con-artist or lies. He is to world weary to put up with the BS.

Warning: If a hard man doing hard things to fix hard problems makes your woman parts hurt then avoid these books.