"Travis McGee Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald John D)

Travis and Meyer go to a (fictitious) town on Florida's West Coast where a local entrepreneur has vanished in an alleged drowning accident. The captain of the boat is a proud and decent guy who got wrongfully blamed for the accident and hires Travis to get his name cleared. Travis and Meyer haul out some fake documents and pass themselves off as real estate development types, all set to do big things for this lovely community you folks have got here. With that act, they have no problem charming their way into the local establishment. While prowling around for information, they come upon several layers of surprises.

In some of these stories Travis has an encounter with a Wrong Woman and then with a Right Woman. The trick is to disentangle the wrong one without doing her any damage. Here, a smitten lounge pianist thinks Travis is the answer to her romantic fantasies until he encourages her to think he's actually a louse. Meanwhile, he falls seriously for a tall, stalwart, athletic beauty named Gretel Howard.




THE GREEN RIPPER - 1980

This book predated the first Rambo movie (1982). Read it and see if you think it had anything to do with inspiring the movie series. Like those movies, it features guerrilla action and commando tactics, and carries far-fetched heroics to the point of surrealism.

Travis was ready to settle down permanently with Gretel Howard (from THE EMPTY COPPER SEA) when she died under strange circumstances. Her death may have something to do with a creepy religious cult in Northern California, and that cult might be involved in sinister international intrigue. Filled with fury and grief, Travis goes to Ukiah, locates the camp, and bumbles into the well-guarded compound as a harmless good ole boy lookin' for his runaway daughter. After poking around and finding out what has been going on within the organization, he destroys the place with a firestorm of military-style vengeance.




FREE FALL IN CRIMSON - 1981

Motorcycle gangs, hot-air balloons, moviemaking, pornography taping - this story combines a lot of outlandish elements. Travis enlists the help of movie star Lysa Dean, who played lead in THE QUICK RED FOX, to help him infiltrate a movie company on location in Iowa. Police Lt. Goodbread, the deceptively dumb-looking cop in THE SCARLET RUSE, makes a brief and helpful appearance.

The villain this time is Dirty Bob, an outlaw biker who got lucky in show business, then got unlucky after Travis uncovers Bob's dirty sideline. Bob runs around working off his fury by murdering anyone who's crossed him, and Travis, of course, is next on the list. Meyer gets in harm's way as Bob's hostage, and has his psychological manhood gutted right out of him.

Travis is smitten with Annie Renzetti, manager of a fancy Gulf Coast hotel. They get a promising relationship going, in spite of the fact that she's only 5'2 instead of the amazon size Travis favors.




CINNAMON SKIN - 1982

Things were getting quite serious between Travis and Annie Renzetti until she opted for upwardly-mobile yuppiehood in chain-hotel management instead of sharing McGee's floating unstructured lifestyle. Meanwhile, Meyer continues to be a broken man after his terrifying encounter with the homicidal biker Dirty Bob in FREE FALL IN CRIMSON.

Travis needs to distract himself from the Annie situation. And, since he feels responsible for Meyer's condition, he hopes having them take on a successful project together will restore Meyer's confidence. So they go hunting a predatory serial killer whose specialty is loving, looting, and killing his female victims. They go to Texas and retrace the suspect's history and ever-changing identities and eventually track the guy to Cancun. With the help of a lovely Mayan senorita, she of the "cinnamon skin", they spring a trap in the jungle. The villain gets his due, Meyer gets his confidence back, and McGee gets to bring home his stunning new ladyfriend.




THE LONELY SILVER RAIN - 1985

John D. MacDonald died in the year following this book. There's such a poignant feeling here of farewell and closure that one is sure he had to have meant this to be the final episode in the saga.

We aren't told what happened to the cinnamon-skinned senorita in the elapsed three years since the previous tale, but some other threads have gotten tied-off. Travis's neighbor, The Alabama Tiger, is now in the Big Marina In The Sky and his nonstop party has ended. Willy Nucci, McGee's pipeline to the underworld, is dying but not before passing along good information and a comely nurse. A lot of the Bahia Mar oldtimers have moved on, and the recent crops of beach bunnies are speaking a different generational language. All this leaves McGee feeling like a time-warped relic.

If Travis, a Korean War vet, were aging in real time he had to have been in his mid-fifties in this story. If the process were slowed, in the manner of comic strips and TV serials, he might be fortyish. (The later books in the series play down the age-placing background clues.) The book ends with a heart-touching big surprise that brings one element full-circle.

Now, on to the plot. Billy Ingraham, just about the only real estate developer in the whole series who's honorable and likeable, wants McGee to find his stolen 52-foot yacht. With the help of Meyer's inspired idea for arial photography all around the Florida coast, McGee locates the boat and discovers three violated and rotting bodies along with evidence of drug running. The South American drug lord family of one of the victims is out for blood and vengence, and their local business partners figure McGee will make a handy sacrificial object. Travis has to go about getting his name off the hit list while he's finding out who killed the folks on the boat. All hell breaks loose near the end, and the guilty rapist-murderer is discovered and dealt with appropriately and profitably.