“I woke up this morning feeling great. Absolutely great. Busting with energy. Know something? I want to get involved in the life and times of Esterland and son. I want to go out and con the people. I want to have to bust a couple of heads here and there and have somebody try to bust mine for me. Why should I feel a little bit guilty about feeling like that, Meyer?”

My life takes me into the state of Iowa fairly frequently, and back in the 1970s and 80s, a frequent feature of my drives down there was the sight of hot air balloons traversing the broad heavens. Iowa was a center for the sport of ballooning back in those days. Since that time, I’m informed, the activity has moved to the southwest. But that period remains memorialized in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novel, Free Fall In Crimson, originally published in 1981.

In sequence, this novel follows The Green Ripper, in which McGee lost a woman he loved and hoped to make a future with. So he’s pretty low at the beginning. He’s losing weight, and even pondering dropping his “salvage” business, to become a boat salesman or something. His friend Meyer worries about him.

Then he’s contacted by Ron Esterland, a newly successful artist from New York. Ron explains that he’s troubled by the circumstances of his father’s death. His father was a successful Florida businessman, married several times, once to a movie star. He was dying of cancer when he was attacked in a highway rest area and beaten to death, more than a year ago. Ron had been estranged from his father, and doesn’t care about his money, but the timing seems suspicious. Could his father have been killed by someone connected to the actress ex-wife, for the inheritance?

McGee agrees to check it out, without great enthusiasm. But when he meets Anne Renzetti, manager of a hotel that Esterland had owned, his interest is piqued and his enthusiasm for life rekindled.

The investigation will take him back to Hollywood, to that snake pit from which he barely escaped alive back in the adventure of The Quick Red Fox. Once again he’ll encounter Lysa Dean, the gorgeous, calculating movie queen to whom he once delivered a rare rejection. She’ll connect him with the ex-wife’s boyfriend, a Hollywood director who’s shooting a movie about ballooning in Iowa. And that will lead him into a confrontation with a psycho motorcycle outlaw who’ll unleash a whole lot of reckless violence and death on a lot of people before the final showdown.

I’d read Free Fall In Crimson before, of course. But I hadn’t remembered much about it except for the balloon ride. I found it to be a very well-written and serious book, and I recommend it highly – with cautions for adult themes and a whole lot of innocent bloodshed.