Plot or Premise

A famous movie star is being blackmailed with dirty pictures and she wants Travis to help get them back.

What I Liked

There isn’t much to like in this outing, except that Travis McGee is assigned a Girl Friday who helps him along with the investigation, so it’s not just him.

What I Didn’t Like

The blackmail scheme is pretty similar to part of the plot in Nightmare in Pink, and not once does McGee make a nod or a wink to having done this before. It’s almost as if the author took the subplot from Book 2 and turned it into a full-fledged plot for Book 4, all published in the same year. It’s very repetitive.

The Girl Friday is his love interest for the story, and reads like a repressed-woman-finally-finds-a-real-man romance fantasy written by a man. It has a few twists and turns, but the character isn’t very well-developed, despite a fantastic backstory.

Finally, there are hints in the story that a new psychopath is involved, who is very puritanical, and this leads nowhere, along with some other twists that read like a bad action film script.

And spoiler alert, there is a warning right at the beginning that plays out at the end, with McGee getting screwed, and yet all McGee has to say “boo” and the whole thing would fall apart. Instead, he goes off mad that he got screwed.

It makes no sense.

The Bottom Line

The quick red fox jumped into a lazy plot