The Empty Copper Sea (Travis McGee, Book 17)
*Starred Review* Travis has hit the doldrums as number 17 begins. His casually hedonistic life no longer satisfies. The question of What next? occupies his mind, obscuring the sun, infecting his relationship with best friend Meyer, and turning the parade of amiable beach bunnies at Bahia Mar Marina from pleasant backdrop to irritating reminder of the triviality of his life. Then Van Harder, an old boating pal, arrives on the deck of The Busted Flush with a tale of woe. Harder’s career as a yacht captain for hire has been ruined by an incident in which he passed out at the helm and his boss was apparently thrown overboard and died. Harder believes he was drugged, but the official verdict was drunkenness. Will Travis prove otherwise and recover his friend’s good name? Trav reluctantly agrees, as uninspired by the task at hand as he is by the rest of his life.  In the course of looking into Harder’s plight, however, Travis meets Gretel Howard, and everything changes: “I felt as if I had shucked some kind of drab outer skin. . . . I could breathe more deeply. . . . The Gulf was a sharper blue. There was wine in the air. . . . I was full of juices and thirsts, energies and hungers, and I wanted to laugh for no reason at all.”  MacDonald has been lauded for his craftsman-like plotting and for his perceptive takes on the sociology of America—and especially Florida—in the sixties and seventies, but rarely has he received the credit he’s due for his ability to plumb human relationships. That talent is on view throughout the series, sometimes between the lines and always bobbing along beneath the head-banging plot, but in Empty Copper Sea, it takes center stage. Trav successfully restores his friend’s good name, but he does it without the usual confrontation with an evil antagonist. Sure, there’s some peripheral head-banging, but the focus here is on Trav’s growing involvement with the initially reluctant Gretel (her previous experiences with tasting wine in the air have turned quickly to vinegar). In fact, in an odd sort of way, this is more a romance than it is a mystery, and it’s a deeply textured, whopping good one.  But it’s still a Travis McGee novel, and we know as we close the book on a remarkably happy ending—almost without the usual melancholy—that the reptilian underbelly of humanity could rise from the swamp at any moment. It does exactly that in number 18, The Green Ripper. --Bill Ott--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.