The Lonely Silver Rain

Travis McGee lives aboard a houseboat he won in a poker game. A self-described “salvage consultant,” he’ll keep half of whatever he recovers for you. Travis locates a stolen boat for a friend, but this offends some South American drug dealers and they put him on a hit list. A subplot develops when somebody leaves little cats made of pipe cleaners on his houseboat. I enjoyed the strong female characters in this book and the non-stop action. The resolution is wonderful and shows a side of McGee the reader has never seen before. This is the last of twenty-one Travis… show more.

This is the last book in the famed Travis McGee series that MacDonald wrote before his death in 1986. At the time, this was the ultimate coastal adventure series, and it cultivated a lifelong obsession for me in this genre. I wish there had been more installments, but it wasn’t meant to be. Throughout the series MacDonald’s style continually evolved and improved, ending with his having become the dean of all the living coastal writers of the time. If you ask the top-ranked coastal adventure writers of today to list three authors that inspired their work and/or styles, MacDonald will… show more.