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It's a salty tale, as most Travis McGee novels are; jaded souls wading in to make right of a bad situation, given meager means and fleeting opportunities. McGee manages well, and if you like jaded antiheroes, McGee's your man.

This time, he takes up for an old friend who's met with a mysterious and unjust fate, one of those fates that might just as easily pass as a tragic story local Florida neighbors remind themselves of, and sadly shake their heads.

This is set in (mostly) pre-developed coastal Florida, just as development greed is setting in, throughout real-life Florida. This was an issue dear to MacDonald's heart.

However there's no moral drum-beating tale to be told here other than times change, and sometimes hapless victims find themselves in the way of commercial progress while clinging to what's dear to them.

Villains are often people who simply begin by making bad decisions, but spend a lifetime burying the clues, and the witnesses.

John D. MacDonald frames 60's and 70's coastal Florida like no one else I've read. I highly recommended this novel, and almost all in the Travis McGee series.