A Tan and Sandy Silence (Travis McGee Mysteries)
*Starred Review* MacDonald’s Travis McGee (“a refugee from a plastic-structured culture, uninsured, unadjusted, and unconvinced”) remains, long after the 21-volume series ended in 1985, one of the crime genre’s most appealing nonconformists. He lives the life every individualist craves: independent, adventurous, and unpredictable. Sequestered on his houseboat sanctuary, The Busted Flush (won in a poker game), moored in slip F-18, Bahia Mar Marina, Fort Lauderdale, he ventures out into the wider world whenever someone he cares about loses something—a loved one, money, or even self-respect—getting back whatever has been lost and keeping 50 percent of the profits.  This novel, the thirteenth in the series and quite possibly the best, represents an important turning point for McGee. On the surface, it looks like a typical McGee adventure: our hero discovers that one of his “wounded ducklings” (emotionally scarred women he has nursed back to psychic and sexual health) has disappeared, leaving a distraught husband. McGee smells foul play and is soon locked in mortal combat with a Ted Bundy–like psycho who enjoys torturing his victims.  Although McGee eventually dispatches his antagonist, it is not before much damage has been done, both to the people he was trying to protect and to his own sense of self. For the first time in the series, McGee is truly vulnerable: “In all my approximately seventy-six inches of torn and mended flesh and hide, in all my approximately fifteen-stone weight of meat, bone, and dismay, I sat on that damned bed and felt degraded.”  McGee’s “wounding” forces MacDonald to deal with an inevitable problem for series authors: how to let the heroes grow and change without sacrificing their mythic stature. By immersing Travis a little further into the everyday world of slowed reflexes and failing nerves, MacDonald heightens the tension between myth and reality, and we receive a stronger jolt of mythic energy when that tension is released. “I know what counts,” Travis tells us, “is the feeling I get when I make my own luck.” After A Tan and Sandy Silence, that feeling is harder to come by, but it’s all the more satisfying when it finally arrives. --Bill Ott