The Scarlet Ruse
*Starred Review* Number 14 in the Travis McGee series starts slowly—unless philately is your thing—but quickly picks up the pace, leading to a vintage MacDonald climax that evokes the classic Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck film Cape Fear. McGee is reluctant to get involved in an aging stamp dealer’s problems—inexplicably, a client’s $400,000 stamp collection has been switched with one containing far less valuable material—but the dealer is an old friend of Trav’s pal Meyer, and, in the end, Meyer usually gets what he wants. It doesn’t hurt that one of the dealer’s assistants is Mary Alice McDermit, a six-footer nearly as fit as the legendarily flat-bellied McGee. As Meyer cogitates over how the locked-room switch could have been engineered, McGee noses around the client, one Frank Sprenger, who turns out to be a money launderer for the Miami Mob. Series fans will immediately see that Sprenger does more than the laundry—the cut of this guy’s jib (and the width of his shoulders) clearly indicates that Travis has found his adversary.  No one is quite what they seem this time around—Mary Alice and Sprenger, especially—and it takes Trav quite a while to put the pieces together. Cut to the Busted Flush, run amok deep in the mangroves, as Trav lays in wait for a predawn visit from Sprenger, on his way, like Mitchum in Cape Fear, to settle scores once and for all. MacDonald writes terrific climaxes—it’s always McGee versus the sociopaths, often with a new wrinkle or two (this time the sociopath is holding Meyer hostage), but as good as the climaxes are, the denouements are almost their equal, delivering postmortem details on the conflagration and showing off Trav’s scars. This time the wounds cut deep, into both Meyer and Trav, but, whereas the former shows that he can play in the hard guys’ league, the latter proves that his rawhide body isn’t quite as vulnerable as we assumed (“I felt as if I was made of cornflakes, stale rubber bands, and old gnawed bones”). This is A-list McGee—and not just because it may be the only time in the series when MacDonald describes his hero in terms that could apply to my own cornflake-brittle frame. --Bill Ott