Darker Than Amber (Travis McGee Mysteries)
There are two very good things about this seventh entry in the Travis McGee series. The first is the opening line: “We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.” That’s good, very good, but the second thing is even better: after a couple of brief cameos, Meyer, the hirsute economist and resident guru to the beach denizens of Bahia Mar Marina, who lives aboard The John Maynard Keynes (birthed a couple of slips down from McGee’s Busted Flush), takes his first turn as a fully fledged supporting character. A McGee novel is never less than entertaining, but the books in which Meyer has a substantial role are always a cut above. Here’s McGee describing his pal: “You can watch the Meyer Magic at work and not know how it’s done. He has the size and pelt of the average Adirondack black bear. He can walk a beach, go into any bar, cross any playground, and acquire people the way blue serge picks up lint, and the new friends believe they have known him forever.”  Consider yourself a piece of lint because after encountering blue-serge Meyer, you, too, will want to sit cross-legged at his feet and listen to him opine about the world—something he does plenty of in the course of helping McGee help the girl who was tossed off the bridge. (The pair were wrapping up a night’s snook fishing and happened to be idling their boat under the bridge from which the woman was thrown.) It turns out the nearly drowned victim is no ordinary beach girl but, rather, a piece of bait in a deadly cruise-ship scam in which pigeons are plucked from the flock, shorn of their cash, and unceremoniously tossed overboard. The lady wants out of the game, and McGee and Meyer set out to help her, which requires their booking a Caribbean cruise themselves and outconning the cons. McGee on a commercial cruise ship seems wrong in a hundred different ways, but it does give MacDonald the opportunity to decry the spectacle of hundreds of overstuffed, sunburned Iowans waddling about a lumbering, creaking vessel in search of the next buffet.  This is a pivotal entry in the series, though, not because of the story but because it gets Meyer into the game and gives the sedentary intellectual a chance to develop his con-man chops. As McGee explains it, he needs Meyer’s “orderly brain . . . to balance the McGee habit of bulling my way in and breaking the dishes.” --Bill Ott