Death comes while you are struggling with your application or lack of application of the Judeo-Christian ethic. While you work out the equation which says, If I don’t kill him, he will kill me, so even if I have been taught not to kill, this is an exception—while you are working that out, he is blowing chunks of bone out of your skull. The quick and the dead is an ancient allusion. They were quick and I was quick and lucky.

I always knew it was coming. Even when this book first came out (and I read it back then) I had to expect that when John D. MacDonald gave his hero Travis McGee the girl of his dreams, a big, healthy, well-balanced woman who seemed to be made for him, he would have to kill her off in the next book. (The author is the true villain of every story.) And so it was. The Green Ripper is the darkest and saddest of the Travis McGee series, and incidentally a harbinger of what future detective fiction would be.

Gretel Tuckerman, Trav’s new woman, has taken a job at a property development and health spa near Fort Lauderdale. One day she notices a stranger on the grounds, and recognizes him from a brief encounter years ago in California. A couple days later she is dead, apparently the victim of a rare disease carried by an insect bite.

But before long, a stricken McGee and his friend Meyer get a visit from some government agents with questions. Thanks to Meyer’s security clearance, they get to ask a few questions of their own. It appears there’s a terrorist network within the US, connected to a secretive religious cult in California. It was Gretel’s misfortune to recognize one of its members, and apparently they murdered her by clandestine means.

This is where McGee goes underground. He assumes a new identity, that of a working fisherman with a drinking problem, headed to California to find his daughter, whom he believes joined the cult. He will find the cult. He will join them. Get to know them. Make friends.

And he will get terrible revenge.

Here, I believe, we see the genesis of the detective thriller as we know it today – the Jack Reacher and Gray Man books and others in the same vein, some better, some not so good. Most Travis McGee books are about the mystery, the problem, with a generous helping of violence thrown in. Today, most detective series are primarily about the violence, with just enough of a mystery to hold the plot together.

As an old fogy, I generally find the older way more enjoyable. And as far as I recall, MacDonald never again went as far into ultra-violence as he did in this story. It’s not that I judge The Green Ripper a bad novel, it’s just that the combination of grief and vengeance makes it a downer.

Also, Meyer, supposedly a genius, makes a lot of economic predictions in this book that haven’t played out well in the real world. On the other hand, we have here an object lesson about avoiding religious groups run by women.

So, not my favorite Travis McGee. But it’s a great series.