Nightmare in Pink

Mike Gibson was an Army buddy of Travia McGee's when they both served in Korea. Mike was blinded and otherwise injured and is in a VA hospital. He gives McGee a call and asks for a favor: his sister's fiancé was mugged and died, and he wants Travis to help her out.

Travis will do anything for his old friend and heads off to New York City. Travis is taking his retirement a little at a time. He takes a job when he needs some money and then retires until he needs funds again. He's a sort of knight errant in tarnished armor. He'll help someone who needs him in exchange for half of what he recovers.

Nina Gibson has some questions about her fiancé. After his death, she finds $10 thousand in a shoe box and doesn't know how he came by the show more money. As Travis begins to look he discovers a complex financial scheme going on. Some con artists are taking a wealthy guy for millions which means that Travis might have gotten in over his head.

Travis stumbles into trouble and finds himself in a hospital where illegal experiments are going on. He's been dosed with an LSD-like potion and learns that the wealthy guy had had the same thing done to him before he had a lobotomy.

He manages to get out, leaving a trail of bodies behind him, and gains a bit paycheck from the wealthy guy's wife. He also gets the girl - at least temporarily.

Travis McGee is a character I first met in 1972 when I was riding Greyhound busses between graduate school and my hometown. He was an interesting sort of hero. He has a strong moral center, but it isn't conventional morality. His attitude toward women reads more than a little chauvinistic at a 50 year remove. But still, if a person is in really bad trouble, Travis McGee would still be my choice of a hero to call upon.

I enjoyed this walk down memory lane. The narration was well done. show less

First time I've read a Travis McGee novel in some time (well, since MacDonald has been dead for some time, that's no surprise). This one, from 1964 finds McGee in New York, looking after the sister of a friend, and trying to recover some money her husband had. MacDonald has good characterizations in this one, and of course those dour pessimistic viewpoints on the human race. Reading the book so many years after it was written shows that some of MacDonald's predictions didn't really come to pass of course, but he wasn't really writing for the ages. There's a long sequence where McGee is locked up in a mental institution and fed what must be LSD, and those scenes seem quite forward looking for the time. I like the McGee books, but show more wouldn't read too many of them. show less

I did not like John D. MacDonald's Nightmare in Pink. Women throw themselves at Travis McGee, but he only says yes to the young, sad ones. Turns their lives around!

McGee analyses every female character from the perspective of, "Would I like to sleep with her?" His deliberations take up too much space that would be better used for character development and plot. This book is sexist, overwrought and sentimental. The plot is laughable.

Didn't like reading McGee out of Florida and certainly didn't like him in an insane asylum. But his reflections, cynicism, and indirect descriptions of sex were there, well developed in this second novel in the series. Always thought of as a Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, Don Quixote was brought in via a long, self-critical, go for broke paragraph at the end of the story. Great ending with McGee nursing, the beginning of many, women back to health in the Florida sun.

McGee reluctantly does a favor for his best friend, a permanently wounded Army vet. The veteran's sister Nina has lost her fiancé to a senseless mugging in NY, and she's not holding up well. Turns out he was working for a company which was systematically looting millions from a very wealthy guy, and he was trying to blow the whistle internally.

The lawyers and accountants behind the scheme have ties to a medical center in upstate NY where doctors are experimenting with mind-altering drugs including LSD; they lobotomized the wealthy guy whose estate is being looted to keep him happy while they continue to steal.

McGee is trapped by the bad guys and dosed with acid himself; he manages to escape through luck or faulty drug dispensation, and show more the plot is uncovered.

This is the second McGee book and it's far from the best, but it's still pretty good. We're treated to more of McGee's thoughts about society here. At one point he's walking the streets of Manhattan and is bumped by a fellow pedestrian who snarls at him, and this takes him off into a theory about New York being the place where society breaks down -- instead of mere snarls at some point the bumper and bumpee will be at each others' throats; onlookers follow along, and soon all urban centers will be jungles with the smarter predators hunting one another through the streets. show less

I like Travis McGee, but sending him to NYC just doesn't work. It felt like McGee was mostly blundering around on the periphery of the conspiracy and had little to do with the bad guys ultimately getting stopped. The 60s era understanding of cognitive science was annoying too. Not one of his better adventures.

A really excellent crime novel. The mystery is one thing, but it's McGee's wry observations on life and human relationships that really impressed me. Superbly readable, it's thrilling, funny, insightful, and has an amazing twist half way through.