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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:From a beloved master of crime fiction, The Turquoise Lament is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat. Funny thing about favors. Sometimes they come back to haunt you. And Travis McGee owes his friend a big one for saving his life once upon a time. Now the friend�??s daughter, Linda �??Pidge�?� Lewellen, needs help five time zones away in Hawaii before she sails off into the deep blue with a cold-blooded killer: her husband. �??The Travis McGee novels are among the finest works of fiction ever penned by an American author.�?��??Jonathan Kellerman When treasure hunter Ted Lewellen saved his life in a bar fight, McGee could never have thought he�??d end up paying his rescuer back in such a way. But years later he finds himself headed to Hawaii at Ted�??s request to find out whether Pidge�??s husband really is trying to kill her, or if she�??s just losing her mind. Of course, once McGee arrives he can�??t help but give in to his baser instincts, and as his affair with Pidge gets underway, he can�??t find a single thing wrong. McGee chalks up Pidge�??s paranoia to simple anxiety, gives her a pep talk, and leaves for home blissfully happy. It�??s not until he�??s back in Lauderdale that he realizes he may have overlooked a clue or two. And Pidge might be in very serious danger. … (more)
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The Turquoise Lament is a relatively late installment in the series, written when the character (and the formula) were already well-established and familiar. You can, as you read it, feel MacDonald deliberately setting out to experiment: to stretch himself by telling a McGee story that subverts every familiar element of the formula. MacDonald is careful to keep the story moving, the exotic locations rolling by, and the mystery plot bubbling, and as a result The Turquoise Lament reads just as smoothly as a typical McGee story. When you get to the end, and look back, though, you realize that you’ve just read something that’s very definitely—and very deliberately—not a typical McGee story.
Whether the idea of such an experiment appeals, and whether MacDonald’s particular execution of it satisfies, is going to be a matter of personal taste. For myself, I’m glad he did it and I’m glad I read it, but—in both contexts—once was enough. If you’re an established fan of the series, The Turquoise Lament is well worth your time. If you’re just Travis McGee, however, this is definitively not the place to start.
Pretty good overall but quite a
Meanwhile, Pidge and her husband are traveling alone on their boat from Hawaii to Pago Pago in American Samoa. As McGee and Meyer unravel the mystery of the missing treasure book, Travis begins to fear for her life (as we readers familiar with the fate of anyone who sleeps with Travis have been doing all along.) As a result, this is a very annoying book, since Travis can't do much to protect her while she is in the middle of the Pacific and basically out of communication. Remember, this book was published in 1973. He does take out some of his frustrations on a crooked lawyer in the book's best scene, which highlights McGee's remorseless, creative, cruelty. The lawyer deserves it, however, so at least this is one book where McGee himself isn't the biggest SOB. I haven't spoiled anything so far, and I won't talk much about the rest of the plot, but I will say that the ending is really a pitiful job of writing. Surely MacDonald could have come up with something a bit more clever than what he did. The reader is asked to have sympathy for poor Travis McGee, a man who in the course of the book spends as much time having sex with various women as he does solving the mystery. Obviously, this is not one of the better books in the series, though it certainly is high in grim fascination and creative ways to kill people.