Meyer can suffer bores without pain. He finds them interesting. He says the knack of being able to bore almost anybody is a great art. He says he studies it.

Among all the riches of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series, The Empty Copper Sea holds a place all its own. Aside from being an artifact of MacDonald’s strongest period, it’s also the book where we get to see our hero most emphatically and ecstatically in love. Even willing to (drum roll, wait for it) commit.

McGee, semi-legal “salvage specialist,” is not at his best as the story begins. He’s just gotten home from a grueling voyage, undertaken as a favor for a friend. He just wants to relax a while. He’s tired; he’s feeling old. The world seems dull and full of irritations.

And along comes Van Harder, an old boating acquaintance. Van is a former drunk who’s now a born-again Christian, punctiliously maintaining his sobriety and rebuilding his life. He had been captaining a boat for a rich man up in the town of Timber Bay, when he suddenly got sick and lost consciousness. When he was awakened (by a kick from the sheriff’s boot) his boss had disappeared and he was being blamed for the disaster. The sheriff believes he had fallen off the wagon. Now no one will hire him.

Van says he knows that Trav recovers things for people, in return for half the value. He estimates the value of his personal reputation, he says, at twenty-thousand dollars. So he’ll pay Trav ten-thousand dollars to go up to Timber Bay and prove his innocence. To either find the boss’s body, or locate him wherever he’s run off to.

Trav and his economist friend Meyer travel to Timber Bay, to find that there’s a lot of speculation about the missing boss. The body was never recovered, and an increasing number of indications suggest he has absconded to Mexico with his Scandinavian mistress.

They encounter and interview a series of characters – all of them well-rounded and interesting. But Trav’s heart isn’t in it – he’s flirting with too many women and getting into too many bar fights.

Until he meets Gretel Tuckerman. Gretel is tall and healthy and beautiful, sister to the missing boss’s right-hand man, for whom she is caring, as he has suffered a brain injury. Some of John D. MacDonald’s most lyrical prose follows, as we watch Travis blissfully in love.

It’s doomed, of course, but that’s for another book (The Green Ripper).

Highly recommended, it goes without saying.