Showing results by author "John D. MacDonald" in All Categories

Private eye Travis McGee outwaits and outwits a deranged killer as he searches for a missing wife on a remote Caribbean island, where he also tangles with a baby-faced businessman with a taste for murder.

A Bullet for Cinderella is one of John D. MacDonald's earlier works but nonetheless is a brilliant piece of writing. A POW in the Korean War, Tal Howard returns to find himself restless and haunted by the tale told to him by a friend who didn't make it home: a stolen fortune hidden away in the soldier's hometown with the only clue a girl named Cinderella. Tal decides to leave everything behind and go and try and find the money.

A lovely young girl steps in front of Travis McGee's headlights. McGee misses the girl but lands in 10 feet of swamp water. As he's limping along the deserted road, someone in an old truck takes a few shots at him. And, when he goes to the local sheriff to complain, the intrepid Travis McGee finds himself arrested and charged with murder. And he can't help but ask himself, "is this what they call southern hospitality?"

He's a self-described beach bum who won his houseboat in a card game. He's also a knight errant who's wary of credit cards, retirement benefits, political parties, mortgages, and television. He only works when his cash runs out, and his rule is simple: he'll help you find whatever was taken from you, as long as he can keep half.

This time out, McGee comes close to losing his status as a living legend when he agrees to track down the killers who brutally murdered an ailing millionaire. For starters, he renews an unfinished adventure with a famous - and oversexed - Hollywood actress, who leads him into a very nasty nest of murderers involving a motorcycle gang, pornographic movies, and mad balloonists. And McGee relearns the old lesson - that only when he comes close to the edge of death does he feel he completely alive.

When Travis McGee's friend Meyer lent his boat to his niece Norma and her new husband Evan, the boat exploded out in the waters of the Florida Keys. Travis McGee thinks it's no accident, and clues lead him to ponder possibilities of drugs and also to wonder where Evan was when his wife was killed.

Helena Pearson. Undeniably beautiful... indisputably rich... incredibly wanton... the perfect client for Travis McGee. He did a big favor for her husband and then for the lady herself. Now Helena is dead, and McGee finds out that she had one last request to make of him: find out why her beautiful daughter, Maurie, keeps trying to kill herself. So, half-convinced that Maurie needs a good doctor and not a devil-may-care beach bum, McGee makes his way to the prosperous town of Fort Courtney, Florida, a respectable, booming, deadly little place.

A classic novel by John D. MacDonald with an exclusive introduction written and read by Dean Koontz. A college graduate and amateur fisherman, Andy McClintock is stuck toiling in the office of a construction company. But when Andy tries to quit, his boss offers him a promotion and a raise - and then promptly kills himself with a harpoon gun. At least, that's what it looks like, until the police rule it homicide - with the murder weapon belonging to Andy.

Now that Linda "Pidge" Lewellen is grown up, she tells Travis McGee, once her girlhood idol, that either she's going crazy or Howie, her affable ex-jock of a husband, is trying to kill her. McGee checks things out, and gives Pidge the all clear. But when Pidge and Howie sail away to kiss and make up, McGee has second thoughts. If only he can get to Pidge before he has time for any more thinking.

Travis things he's in for a quiet summer until a walking zombie of a man, Arthur Wilkinson, stumbles aboard The Busted Flush. He's the latest victim of a fragile-looking blond sexpot who uses the blackest arts of love to lure unsuspecting suckers into a web of sordid schemes. Gone, suddenly, are the lazy, hazy days of summer as Travis becomes embroiled in one of the most dangerous, dirtiest cases of his career.

Travis McGee is too busy with his houseboat to pay attention to the little old man with the missing postage stamps. Except these are no ordinary stamps. They are rare stamps. Four hundred thousand dollars worth of rare. And if McGee doesn't recognize their value, perhaps Mary Alice McDermit, a six-foot knockout who knows all the ways to a boat bum's heart, will. Only it's not McGee's heart that's in danger. Because a syndicate killer has put a contract on McGee.

A Purple Place for Dying finds Travis McGee witness to a murder he can't prove and a kidnapping nobody wants to believe. McGee becomes a pawn between a wealthy Southwestern patriarch, the law, and a mysterious gang bent on insurance fraud. Just the kind of thing McGee revels in!

Searching for a wealthy friend's yacht, Travis McGee puts himself square in the center of the international cocaine trade, and finds himself the target of some of the most ruthless villains he's ever met. Contemplating his own mortality for the first time, Travis McGee discovers amid all the danger the astonishing surprise behind the cat-shaped pipe cleaners someone is leaving at his door.

A wealthy old man laid up in the hospital is desperate to understand the last months of his daughter's life before she was killed in a car crash in Mexico. It was puzzling. She'd cleaned out her considerable bank account, left Miami and hadn't been heard from again. Travis McGee ventures into the steep hills and strange backwoods of Oaxaca through a bizarre world of dropouts, drug freaks, and kinky rich people - and begins to suspect the beautiful girl's death was no accident.

A classic novel by John D. MacDonald with an exclusive introduction written and read by Dean Koontz. A Flash of Green tells the gripping story of small-town corruption and two people brave enough to fight back, featuring many of the themes John D. MacDonald explored better than anyone in his legendary career as a leading crime novelist. The opportunists have taken over Palm City. Silent and deadly, like the snakes that infest the nearby swamps, they lay hidden from view, waiting for the right moment to strike. Political subterfuge has already eased the residents toward selling out.

Hero of The Dreadful Lemon Sky is Travis McGee, a man of universal interest and independent means who lives on an old houseboat he won in a poker game. One evening a young woman shows up with a suitcase full of cash. McGee agrees to be bagman.She tells him what to do if she doesn't return. When she doesn't, McGee is left alone to deal with an intrigue that involves drugs, fear, passion, and death.

How to you extort $600,000 from a dying man? Someone had done it very quietly and skilfully to the husband of Travis McGee's ex-girlfriend. McGee flies to Chicago to help untangle the mess and discovers that, although Dr. Fortner Geis had led an exemplary life, there were those who'd take advantage of one "indiscretion" and bring down the whole family. McGee also discovers he likes a few members of the family far too much to let that happen....

Beautiful girls always grace the Florida beaches; strolling, sailing, relaxing at the many parties on Travis McGee's houseboat, The Busted Flush. McGee was too smart - and had been around too long - for many of them to touch his heart. Now, however, there was Gretel. She had discovered the key to McGee - to all of him - and now he had something to hope for. Then, terribly, unexpectedly, she was dead. From a mysterious illness, or so they said. But McGee knew the truth; that Gretel had been murdered.

Van Harder, once a hard drinker, has found religion. But that doesn't keep folks from saying he murdered his employer, Hub Lawless, whose body hasn't been found. To clear his name, and clear up the mystery, Van asks friend-in-need Travis McGee to find out what really happened. What McGee finds is that Timber Bay is a tough town to get a break in when you're a stranger asking questions. But what he also finds is that, dead or alive, Hub Lawless is worth a lot of money.

Her veneer was big city...but one look and you knew Toni Raselle's instincts were straight out of the river shack from where she came. I watched her as she toyed with the man, laughing, her tumbled hair like raw blue-black silk, her brown shoulders bare. Eyes deep-set, a girl with a gypsy look. So this was the girl I had risked my life to find. This was the girl who was going to lead me to a buried fortune in stolen loot.