The Green Ripper (Travis McGee Mysteries)
*Starred Review* If The Empty Copper Sea is the most romantic book in the Travis McGee series, The Green Ripper is, far and away, the darkest. As it happens very near the novel’s beginning, and as it’s announced on the dust jacket, it’s no spoiler to reveal that Gretel Howard, the love of McGee’s life, the woman poised to take him away from the lazy hedonism of the marina, dies a sudden and violent death, the victim of a poison dart, the kind Soviet agents affix to the tips of umbrellas. But why Gretel, who was working as a physical trainer and tennis coach at an innocuous fat farm near Fort Lauderdale? Apparently because she accidentally saw a man at the farm whom she recognized as being part of a religious cult that once recruited her former sister-in-law. But that still doesn’t make much sense to Trav or his big-brained pal Meyer until a couple of federal agents show up and fill in some of the blanks: The Church of the Apocrypha is a religious cult, yes, but it’s also a heavily armed terrorist organization intent on fomenting class warfare in the U.S.  Trav, of course, is sworn off any attempt to investigate the group, but he has other ideas—a campaign far different from his usual Robin Hoodish ventures: “This time, my dead love, I am not doing my knightly routine. I have shelved that as inappropriate for the occasion. The old tin-can knight had too many compunctions, scruples, whatevers. For this caper, I am the iceman. I have come here and brought the ice. It is a delivery service. One time only.”  Shirking his McGee identity and signing his houseboat over to Meyer, Trav goes on the road, landing in Northern California and allowing himself to be captured by the cult and then joining their motley crew of terrorists, 10 men and 2 women trained to kill and devoted to a perverted ideal. He displays enough strength and knowledge of weaponry to become an asset to the group, holding back just enough of his skills to save for later. Then the bloodbath begins: “With the ghastly, toothy grin of the skull head of death looking over my shoulder, I was intensely alive.” This is a new kind of life for our Travis, however, and the contrast between the knight errant, helper of the meek, and this new, determined angel of death is shocking both to the reader and to Travis himself.  Robert B. Parker fans will notice the similarity between The Green Ripper and Parker’s A Catskill Eagle (1985), in which Spenser embarks on his own blood-soaked, vengeance-fueled journey. But Ripper is darker, more focused on the releasing of the hero’s inner demon. Without the near-idyllic romance between Trav and Gretel, portrayed in The Empty Copper Sea, this personal transformation might not work, but in the context of the earlier book, it strikes a profound chord in anyone who has lusted to take a pound of flesh from an unforgiving world.  Beyond the personal Götterdämmerung, the novel proves remarkably prescient about the coming of an age of idealism-driven terrorism. Speaking through his economist-philosopher Meyer (and more than 30 years before 9/11), MacDonald prophetically describes the contemporary terrorist mind-set, recognizing that one man—even one as determined as Travis—can’t stop the tide of history.  At the end of the novel, McGee is carrying psychic wounds deeper than ever before. Stay tuned for the series’ three concluding novels to see if those wounds heal. --Bill Ott--This text refers to thePaperbackedition.