LONELY SILVER RAIN

Travis McGee, Florida's favorite beach-bum adventurer and hero of 22 MacDonald novels, is having long, moody thoughts on middle age and absent friends—when he's persuaded by super-rich Billy Ingraham to try to find his stolen million-dollar yacht. McGee finds it all fight, with the slaughtered bodies of three young people aboard, one of them the daughter of a Peruvian diplomat. Furthermore, some high-level drug trafficking seems to be involved—and before long Ingraham is murdered in an elaborately faked natural death. Can attempts to kill McGee himself be far behind? Of course not. So he's soon forced to explore the seamy byways of the drug trade. . . and, with help from undercover drug-agent Scott Browder, finally gets off the hook. True, it all sounds like a standard replay, and originality is definitely not the drawing card here. But MacDonald makes the old story seem freshly readable—with expert plotting, canny suspense-building, on-target dialogue, and credibly kooky/kinky characters. . . including a new lady guaranteed to put old Trav into a more cheerful frame of mind.