A - F   TITLES

SUMMARIES AND REVIEWS OF JDM NOVELS

What follows on the next several pages is a look at the books, in alphabetical order, with the “blurb”from the back cover of each book. In a few cases I have added a somewhat critical and philosophical overview of the novel.

These reviews are being done as the spirit moves me, but it will be completed at some point.

Since one problem is not revealing the "ending" of a book I have chosen to comment on the skeletonof the plot and the impact of the book as a whole to me. I am on my 6th or 7th re-reading of most of the books, a process covering much of the past 40 years.

If you've read a particular book and want to share some thoughts just email me at

 I’ve heard from D.R. Martin, who is more than an avid reader, and who has a blog devoted to discussing the McGee novels. Go to this site for more information:

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DELL: 1957

LOST WEEKENDS IN THE BAHAMAS SUN—AND BENEATH THE RUM-DAZED SURFACE

OF THE HOUSE-PARTIES RAGED A TITANIC STRUGGLE FOR POWER.

There were enough girls for everyone. And Mike Dean had a use for all of them. He used them as he would his liquor, his sunshine,his hospitality, his own personal magnetism—to take other men's minds off their troubles, to soften their consciences, to muddy their good sense, to bendthem to his will.

But one of his house guests refused to see things Mike Dean's way.

One of them had a mind of his his own, and a heart of his own. One of them wouldn't be bought.

He is the Hero of this fascinating behind the scenes novel of corporate power and glory andcorruption.

Fawcett: 1954

         SHE WOULD HAUNT ME FOREVER. . .

    She had taken all I had - using the weapons of her money and her

    demanding hunger for a new man to make me into something less than

    a man. She had condemned everybody who had loved her to a lifetime

    of shame and self-hatred.

    But someone stronger than I had turned on her, killed her, and

    thrown that tantalizing body into the cold lake.

    And now all of us were free at last . . . or were we?

Dell: 1956

THE STAGE WAS SET Harry Mullin hit town first. Harry had

    just made the F.B.I.'s Ten Most Wanted list, and he was a

    little nervous about being seen With him at the rented

    house from which they planned to case the job.

    With him was a girl named Sal, who had fallen into the

    easy sluttish rut of being a good woman to a bad man . . .

    Then Ace turned up. The Ace had been very good in his

    day, but he was going a little to flab, and maybe he

    had lost something in the guts department . . .

    The last one into town was Ronnie. Ronnie had killed

    twelve men and two women in the past seven years,

    and had gotten to like his job - maybe a little too much .


Dell: 1954

        My brother's wife.

         Weaver of black magic stained with blood.

        Temptress who haunted my restless nights.

        Wife gloriously beautiful in her widow's weeds.

        Woman I still wanted with the craving of the damned.

Hodder and Stoughton: 1986

    There are two kinds of men in Mississippi. The make natural

    enemies. And sometimes, but only if the balance between strength

    and weakness tips too far, unnatural allies.

    Tucker Loomis is a hard and dangerous man with a ruthlessness all

    West Bay fears and respects, and an improbable amount of money.

    Wade Rowley is a common man who aspires to honor but gets caught

    up in the footwork of a skilled swindler.

    In a pitiless game with a few harsh rules and just one way of

    keeping score, the wrong man will die and another will get away

    with more than murder.






First published 1959 Fawcett

    SURE, LEO RICE WAS A NICE GUY . . .

    But why did he choose our beach? He could have gone ten miles up

    the strip and all of us could have lived happily ever after - with

    no questions asked.




1956 by Popular Library: 1965

       TWO HEADLONG TALES OF INTRIGUE, SUSPENSE, AND MURDER

       BY A MASTER STORYTELLER:

BORDER TOWN GIRL

    Once, Lane Sanson had been a Somebody - a war correspondent and a

    best-selling author. Now he was a nobody, bumming around Mexico.

    Lost, lonely, hungry for hope, he was a pushover for a border town

    B-girl - the perfect fall guy for a lethal frame-up.

LINDA

    She was born with the morality gene missing. As beautiful, as

    inviting, as treacherous as the sea around her, Linda is one of

    the most compelling women yet created by John D. MacDonald.


FAWCETT: 1950

    Take a hard-boiled ex-cop named Cliff Bartells.

    Take a beautiful girl with the unlikely name of Melody Chance.

    Take the death of of one Elizabeth Stegman of Boston,

    Massachusetts.

    Take her missing jewels insured for seven hundred and fifty

    thousand dollars.

    Add them all up and what have you got? Murder for profit. Cold

    blooded, premeditated murder . . .

Dell: 1955

         HER VENEER WAS BIG CITY . . .

    But one look and you knew that Toni Raselle's instincts were

    straight out of the river shack she came from.

    I watched her as she toyed with the man, laughing, her tumbled

    hair like raw blue-black silk, her brown shoulders bare. Eyes

    deep-set, a girl with a gypsy look.

    So this was the girl I had risked my life to find. This was the

    girl who was going to lead me to a buried fortune in stolen loot.



Fawcett: 1958

     She was very young. She was dangerous.

    She was a girl who lived too close to the edge of violence.

    She hunted trouble. She was an exhibitionist, a body-worshipper, a

    sensualist.

    She was without morals, scruples, ethics. She was beautiful.

    She was CLEMMIE . . .




Appleton-Century Crofts: 1953


    FOR FIFTEEN YEARS THEY HAD BEEN MARRIED.

    Fletcher and Jane Wyant. They had built a perfect marriage - -two wonderful kids,

    a beautiful home, their own private never-ending love affair.

    Fletcher thought he knew Jane completely. No dark secrets. No

    hidden past.

    Then one hot summer week everything changed. And suddenly,

    brutally, Jane became a cold stranger.

    CANCEL ALL OUR VOWS is a vivid, shocking novel of lawless love and

    shattering desires - -desires that bring men and women to the

    brink of disaster.






Lippencott: 1977

Welcome to Golden Sands, the dream condominium built on a weak foundation

and a thousand dirty secrets. JDM’s powerful novel is a panoramic look at the

shocking facts of life in a Sun Belt community: the real estate swindles and political

payoffs, the maintenance charges that run up, and the health benefits that run out,

the crack-ups and marital breakdowns, the disaster that awaits those who play in

the path of a hurricane.

(Note: read this and Murder In The Wind and you just might stay away from Florida during Hurricane season.)









Appleton-Century: 1954 

     EVIL CASTS A LONG SHADOW . . .

    and touches the innocent along with the guilty in this powerful,

    probing novel of a family who can no longer hide from the world or

    each other.

    For years the Delevan image reflected only the best of everything

    - wealth, position, influence, and the kind of expensive good

    looks that takes generations to cultivate.

    No one dared suspect that their glittering facade, their cherished

    privacy masked hidden lusts, furtive pleasures, and twisted dreams

    which would soon erupt into a pattern of strange violence that

    threatened to destroy them all.


Simon and Schuster: 1959

     Anton Drovek started The Crossroads Corporation forty years ago

    with a shack and a petrol pump. Now it is a flourishing,

    still-expanding motel.

    The endless stream of trucks and cars, Maine-to-Florida and back,

    stop here while their drivers eat, sleep, fill up and roll on.

    'The crossroads is a smoothly managed oasis for the hungry

    motorist and tired trucker. It's a booming little city, owned and

    run by the tightly-knit, hard-driving Drovek family.

    But all is not smooth beneath the surface. Sylvia, Peter Drovek's

    wife, tells a young employee how he can steal Papa Drovek's

    $200,000 in cash, though she doesn't mention that it is someone

    else's cold, calculating plan.

    None of the three persons who execute the robbery knows all that

    the other two have in mind. The reader knows more than any of

    them, but even he can't foresee the final violent explosion - an

    ending which for some of the Droveks is a new beginning.


Popular Library: 1955

     A GUNMAN ON THE RUN

    A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD CHICK

    A USED-UP B-GIRL

    A GUILT-STRICKEN WIDOWER

    A LEFTOVER MISTRESS

    ALL ZEROING IN ON - A ROUTE TO SUDDEN DEATH

    A shattering six-car smashup is the explosive core of this head-long story.

    In typical MacDonald fashion, we are introduced to a fascinating cast of characters

    and shown what happens to them inside and out, before, during, and after the crash.


1952 by Fawcett

    THE HEAT HIT THEM ALL . . .

    the scorching heat of Mexico, and it ate at their nerves. The

    stalled ferry held them in the heat until they could stand no

    more.

    The honeymooners fought, and loved and fought again. The

    pretty little tramp clawed her married lover's eyes. The

    trembling killer looked behind and knew his time was short.

    There were others waiting, too, some good, some bad, but all

    of them tormented by the shape of disaster to come.

    Time gave them all a second chance.

    Most of them stepped on the face of time.



1953 Fawcett

    Set in Florida. It is the story of McClintock, a bitter man who

    has taken refuge on the keys and shut away the world that had

    scarred him.

    But the world came after him—in the shape of a manic killer

    who threatene McClintock's house of cards and taught him

    how to love again.




Dell : 1959

     Ramona Beach, Florida, was a dangerous place to mix

     business with pleasure. Strangers usually meant

    trouble, and the local sheriff echoed the town's

    sentiments with a blackjack.

    Once Ramona Beach had been my home, as a kid--but

    now they'd railroaded me out of town. "Can't trust trash,"

    they said. I'd never been back.

    But that was then and this was now. Now I'd been sent

    home by my employer, the Defense Department, to locate

    a particular scientist and bring him back alive. But

    Ramona Beach had a long memory, and

    so did I . . .



Dell: 1957

    In life, Jane Ann never had much use for a halo, but

    in her violent death she finally earned one.

    When they found a suspect, everyone relaxed, except me.

    Maybe I should have stayed out of it, but I owed a big

    debt to the patsy they were sending to the electric chair in

    a week.

    And I would have stayed out of it if I'd known what my

    own chances were of coming out alive.



    Dell: 1958

    A Stunning Novel of Modern Morals

    Her name was Cindy, and she was his neighbor's wife - the

    woman next door in the kind of suburbia that didn't make

    headlines. No cheap scandals here - no wife-swapping, no

    key games. These were real people, nice people like Cindy

    and Cark who fought with the desperation of the damned to

    keep from wanting each other.

    Had a perfect opportunity not presented itself, perhaps

    nothing would have happened. But suddenly it was the right

    time, the right place. And there was no room left for

    pretense.

    In that moment, all innocence drained out of their lives. Two

    real people, two nice people, became creatures of passion -

    and guilt.


Fawcett: 1963

    Lucille Hanson had rid herself of the wrong man - her rich

    husband who lived casually and loved carelessly. Then she

    found another man she hoped would be right. She was

    putting together the pieces of her life - determined not to

    make the old mistakes, the foolish ones which had almost

    wrecked her the first time around - until all of her hopes

    came to rest at the bottom of a lake where her body was

    found. It must have been an accident, was what others

    wanted to think. But among her mourners just one person

    refused to believe it was anything but murder.


1952 by Fawcett

    THE HEAT HIT THEM ALL . . .

    the scorching heat of Mexico, and it ate at their nerves. The

    stalled ferry held them in the heat until they could stand no

    more.

    The honeymooners fought, and loved and fought again. The

    pretty little tramp clawed her married lover's eyes. The

    trembling killer looked behind and knew his time was short.

    There were others waiting, too, some good, some bad, but all

    of them tormented by the shape of disaster to come.

    Time gave them all a second chance.

    Most of them stepped on the face of time.



1953 Fawcett

    Set in Florida. It is the story of McClintock, a bitter man who

    has taken refuge on the keys and shut away the world that had

    scarred him.

    But the world came after him—in the shape of a manic killer

    who threatene McClintock's house of cards and taught him

    how to love again.




Dell : 1959

     Ramona Beach, Florida, was a dangerous place to mix

     business with pleasure. Strangers usually meant

    trouble, and the local sheriff echoed the town's

    sentiments with a blackjack.

    Once Ramona Beach had been my home, as a kid--but

    now they'd railroaded me out of town. "Can't trust trash,"

    they said. I'd never been back.

    But that was then and this was now. Now I'd been sent

    home by my employer, the Defense Department, to locate

    a particular scientist and bring him back alive. But

    Ramona Beach had a long memory, and

    so did I . . .




Popular Library: 1957

    Lloyd Wescott was a big boy, and he knew that big money doesn't smell like roses. When he was hired to build and run the Green Oasis, he didn't have to ask the pedigree of its owner or where the backing came from. He didn't care, as long as the place was legit and he could run it clean as a whistle.

    But just try to whistle when the Big Man moves in, when skimming is the least of what's going on in the casino, when the quiet luxury is crawling with contract guns, and when a soft, beautifulwoman - beaten to within an inch of her life - looks at you with love and fear and the desperate longing to escape . . .



First published 1960 by Simon andSchuster

            THE WOLF PACK MURDERS

    Three men and a beautiful girl on a cross-country terror spree - a coast-to-coast rampage of stealing, kidnapping, rape and killing.

    Who were they? Where did they come from? Why did they do it? Who were their victims?

    With chilling detail John D. MacDonald unwraps the grotesque inner world of these four drug-crazed young sadists and brings into terrifying focus those random, violent lusts that lie hidden between mischief and madness - waiting unseen for some innocent and helpless stranger at THE END OF THE NIGHT.

The first edition in 1957 by Fawcett brought great reviews. It was later re-issued under the title of Cape Fear, and the film version with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum was very successful. Most JDM fans prefer this film to that released in the 90’s with Robert DeNiro playing the villain.

Max Cady has spent 14 years in a cell, plotting his revenge against the man who put him there, attorney Sam Bowden. Bowden’s teen-aged daughter may be the way Cady achieves his evil aim. There is a great deal of tension which is built by way of MacDonald’s skill in writing. Cady’s pursuit of the daughter is quite chilling. This is one of JDM’s best novels.







1962 by Simon and

    Schuster

A GRIPPING NOVEL OF SMALL-TOWN CORRUPTION AND TWO PEOPLE WHO FIGHT IT.

    Jimmy Wing was only trying to help his friend's

    widow. At leasT that's what he told himself after

    he warned Kate Hubble that the beautiful bay that

    she and her neighbors had struggled to save was

    now going to be sold to developers. He knew he

    shouldn't have told her anything. He was a

    reporter, trained to reveal nothing. But he

    was falling in love with her.

    The corruptors had taken over Palm City. Silent

    and deadly like the snakes that infested the nearby

    swamps, they lay hidden from view, waiting for

    the right moment to strike. Political treachery

    and private greed had already softened up the

    town for the big sell-out.

  All that had to be done now was to silence a few

  stubborn citizens. Kate Hubble was one of them and

  blackmail was their favorite weapon.

Note: This is often cited by readers as being a MacDonald favorite.

Also, it was adapted and directed by Victor Nunez into a film, in 1984. 

JDM visited the film location one day and apparently felt that Nunez’ interpretation was very close to what he had in mind when writing the novel.






















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