Travis McGee and his trusted friend Meyer are fishing in a secluded location late one night when a car stops on the bridge overhead. Next thing they know a woman wearing cement shoes is thrown into the water and sinks to the bottom. Acting quickly, McGee is just barely able to get her out alive. Once she’s recovered from the shock, she tells them the shocking story. A beautiful young woman, Evangeline (“Vangie” to her friends) has been a prostitute since she was a teenager, and found herself wrapped up with a gang of criminals who target lonely, foolish men with money to spend and no one to miss them. She’s vague on the details, but Vangie eventually grew a conscience and was nearly killed for it.
Once she learns about McGee’s line of work (for the uninitiated, Travis McGee is essentially a tough-guy for hire who specializes in recovering lost funds. He takes a hefty 50% commission for his services.) Vangie wants his help getting her nest egg back. She’s been squirreling away money in case she ever needed an escape. She’s willing to split it with McGee if he can help.
McGee could use the money, since his “retirement fund” is running low, but he’s also drawn to something more. Feeling a duty to Vangie since he saved her life, and unable to shake the image of all those men the gang has disposed of, McGee wants to take down the whole operation.
The Travis McGee series is a curious thing. Some of the entries are more traditional hardboiled detective stuff, whereas others are more akin to adventure stories or thrillers. Darker than Amber is definitely in the latter category. There is no suspense about what is going on here. There’s no puzzle to play along with or solution to guess. It’s just a straightforward revenge tale. As such, I found it fairly unmemorable. MacDonald is so good at what he does that it was still a fun read, but it’s definitely one of the weaker books in the series. One of the usual highlights of a McGee book is his relationships with women, but that element is largely absent here, aside from some overblown stuff about McGee needing to resist the temptation to sleep with the sex workers hitting on him. There is also the usual amount of McGee’s retrograde social psychology, which here involves both his thoughts on sex work and, thanks to a brief interaction with a black maid involved in the Civil Rights movement, race relations. McGee’s blunt talking points on hot-button issues will surely put off many readers, but they do a good deal toward defining his character.
Without a real mystery to solve, Darker than Amber limps toward a fairly inevitable confusion. It’s hard to wring drama from a fight scene when you know one of the combatants is going to be in the next 12 books in the series.