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A review by erickibler4
Darker Than Amber by John D. MacDonald
4.0
So far, I haven’t done wrong in choosing a Travis McGee book to read, and now I’m up to #7. Travis is a good-natured lug who lives on his houseboat in Fort Lauderdale, and occasionally takes on “salvage work” to finance his permanent semi-retired Jimmy Buffett lifestyle. His salvage work basically works like this: someone has been bilked out of a large some of money and will never get it back without Travis’s help. Travis recovers the money, but his fee is half the sum recovered.
In this one, Travis and his buddy Meyer happen to be fishing under a bridge when a woman is thrown off the bridge wired to a hunk of concrete. Travis saves her life and uncovers a theft/murder ring who operate on cruise ships.
Meyer has a bigger role in this one than in previous installments, and I hope this continues.
The Travis McGee books all contain quite a bit of Travis’s homemade philosophy, which nowadays would be considered dated and chauvinistic, but at the time would have been fairly progressive. It’s pretty similar to Robert Heinlein’s socially libertarian homilies found in such books as Stranger in a Strange Land, but without the near-fascism that you have to put up with in some other Heinlein books.
At the end of the day, Travis is a tarnished knight who frets about the morality of his actions, and ultimately does the right thing. A good guy in constant doubt that he is one.
In this one, Travis and his buddy Meyer happen to be fishing under a bridge when a woman is thrown off the bridge wired to a hunk of concrete. Travis saves her life and uncovers a theft/murder ring who operate on cruise ships.
Meyer has a bigger role in this one than in previous installments, and I hope this continues.
The Travis McGee books all contain quite a bit of Travis’s homemade philosophy, which nowadays would be considered dated and chauvinistic, but at the time would have been fairly progressive. It’s pretty similar to Robert Heinlein’s socially libertarian homilies found in such books as Stranger in a Strange Land, but without the near-fascism that you have to put up with in some other Heinlein books.
At the end of the day, Travis is a tarnished knight who frets about the morality of his actions, and ultimately does the right thing. A good guy in constant doubt that he is one.