The thirteenth novel in the series finds “salvage consultant” Travis McGee in a more contemplative frame of mind than usual. He’s been spending time with a beautiful widow of considerable means and she seems intent on making Trav husband #2. Remarkably, he finds himself at least a little drawn to the idea. McGee’s mind is changed when a man comes to see him and accuses McGee of sleeping with his wife. Travis doesn’t sense the danger until it’s almost too late, narrowly avoiding the hail of bullets.
Eventually, Travis learns that the wife in question, his former flame Mary Dillon, now Mary Broll, has run off and left her husband after catching him in an act of infidelity. It’s bad timing for Mr. Broll, as he’s over-extended himself in a real-estate scheme and needs to borrow from his wife’s trust to cover some losses until the scheme starts to pay off.
Travis wants to find Mary just to make sure she’s okay, and eventually the trail leads him to Grenada, where he ends up encountering the dangerous individual actually behind Mary’s disappearance.
The Travis McGee novels are hard to categorize. Some of them hew closer to the tenets of detective fiction, but others are closer to adventure stories. A Tan and Sandy Silence is the latter. There’s no investigating here, really. Travis stumbles onto the perpetrators and the rest off the book is just him trying to stay alive and get revenge, in that order.
Personally, I like the McGee series better when there’s more of a mystery to chew on. This book gets tiresome in a lot of different ways. McGee’s midlife-crisis leads to a lot of pontificating about the state of the world, etc. This is always an element of the McGee books, but it’s especially heavy-handed here. There’s also just a ton of misogyny and mistreatment of women, to an actually alarming extent. There are a couple of violent scenes involving female characters that made me very uncomfortable, even for someone who’s read many other crime novels of the time.
Without the intrigue of a mystery to sustain the reader’s interest, A Tan and Sandy Silence drags along for over 300 pages while it’s “man of action” protagonist dithers about breaking things off with his wealthy girlfriend and grumbles about how the world is changing. There’s not a lot for the reader to latch onto. A real low-point for the McGee series.