In this third book of the Travis McGee series, MacDonald takes his hero to a desert town in Arizona, where he meets a potential client who wants his help in recovering money she believes her husband stole from her. Just as he is deciding not to take the job, she is shot and killed right in front of him. Of course, rather than getting out of town as quickly as possible, Trav stays to unravel the mystery of who killed her.
I was unexpectedly impressed by the first novel in this detective series, The Deep Blue Good-Bye, finding it to be much superior for the genre. Unfortunately, the second and third (this one) of the series seem to me to be not much out of the ordinary--competently written, but with little else to recommend them.
A couple of things really disturbed me here: It is revealed that the dead client's husband habitually paddled her behind until she could barely sit down when she "misbehaved." But here's the disturbing part--neither Trav nor anyone else seems to find this in any way wrong or abusive. The other thing--a reclusive, obsessive, sexually repressed, and otherwise neurotic young woman in brought to normality through the healing power of Trav's lovemaking. It would seem that he should hire out as a sexual therapist rather than as a recoverer of lost things, because he is very good at healing damaged women through his sexual ministrations. These ideas about male-female relationship seem to be severely out of date even for 1964, the year the book was written.
A fast and effortless read with a bit of suspense. That's about it.
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