A missing collection of valuable figurines leads Travis McGee to the killer of an old friend, Sam Taggart. It tends to be later in the Travis McGee series when the tales turn significantly darker (say, after The Tan and Sandy Silence), but this early installment, number five, displays a strong hint of what is to come. It starts, as so many of the 21 novels do, with the appearance, on the deck of McGee’s houseboat, The Busted Flush, of a friend in trouble. This time it’s Sam Taggart, a fellow adventurer committed to living by his wits; unfortunately, Sam’s wits aren’t quite as quick as Travis’, and he has landed in a serious jam south of the border. But if he can just peddle the Aztec idol he has lifted from serious bad guys, Sam should be able to start a new life in Ft. Lauderdale with Nora, the girl he foolishly dumped before leaving for Mexico. There are no new lives to be had. McGee and Nora find Sam dead on the floor of a sleazy motel, his throat professionally slashed from ear to ear. The two of them set off for Mexico to extract several pounds of flesh and, hopefully, salvage the profit that would have been Sam’s from the sale of the idol. So far, so good. We’re on familiar McGee ground here: the salvage operation is afoot; the wounded dove, Nora, is ensconced on a beach in Mexico, prime for some psychic and sexual healing, which Trav delivers with his usual aplomb. And, of course, MacDonald has ample opportunity to rail against the absurdities of American tourists on display in Mexico. But then the wind changes. The bad guys are hard to find, being both too numerous and too ambiguous; the wrong bodies start to pile up; and Travis begins to feel the most unlikely of emotions: intimations of vulnerability. And, finally, a very curious thing happens: our beach-bum hero transforms into the novel’s real wounded dove, a teeth-chattering, head-hanging wreck of a man, in desperate need of rejuvenation. The Aztec idol plot gets a little messy, requiring too much explication to sort out who did what and stole what and from whom, but for committed series readers, this novel offers the first good look at just how shrewd MacDonald can be. Through four books, he has eased his readers into letting the comforts of formula fiction roll over us like a gentle wave: we’re grown accustomed to the rhythms of watching McGee work and play; we’ve chuckled at MacDonald’s sociopolitical commentary; and, best of all, we’ve found little bits of our fantasy selves in Travis’ nonconformity and his unshakable savviness. Now, suddenly, the wave is no longer gentle, and we’re tossed onto the rocks of ugly reality. We bounce free, of course, just as McGee’s teeth eventually stop chattering, but the warning MacDonald has issued is clear: get comfortable, that’s what formula fiction is for, but don’t take comfort for granted. --Bill Ott When I first arrived at Ballantine, where I am the mass market managing editor, we were just undergoing a daunting task: repackaging all of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels. We were giving him a brand-new, beautiful look; ingeniously, we used a deep blue color for THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY, a gold color for A DEADLY SHADE OF GOLD, a lavender hue for THE LONG LAVENDER LOOK, etc. But as I worked on the actual stories themselves, I realized that as colorful as these books now are on the outside, they're even more colorful on the inside. In order to prepare these books, we had to have them retyped from scratch; some of these books are so old that the plates had died, so we had nothing to print from. So all the books had to be proofread as if they were new books, and what a joy it was working on them. I unexpectedly rediscovered an author and character I knew very little about. Travis McGee is one of the great characters in crime fiction, and John D. MacDonald a fascinating storyteller. You never know what either is going to do next, or say next; what is going on in their minds is as important, if not more so, then what is going on outside Travis's boat. All of which add up to a heckuva fun series. Mark Rifkin, Managing Editorial Author: MacDonald, John D.. Publisher: Fawcett Pages: 448 Publication Date: 1996 Edition: Reprint Binding: Mass Market Paperback MSRP: 7.99 ISBN13: 9780449224427 ISBN: 0449224422 Language: en Quality Rating: 1 "Book cover image may be different than what appears on the actual book."