59. Murder in the Wind by John D. MacDonald

Wow, an absolute banger!  I had been putting this one off for a long time.  It is the last of the Ed Gorman recommended JdM's so I was saving it.  Also, as I've expressed in my previous reviews, I had been growing somewhat weary of MacDonald's style, especially his sometimes convoluted sexual mores.  I gave in because I just needed a pallette cleanser and something hard and direct after some of the longer books I've been struggling through.  Well I am very pleased to report that this was absolutely great, one of my favourite JdM's (after Condominium, which I can consider a classic now that my sister loved it; interestingly also centered around a hurrican).

Because of the title and the way it began, I thought we were going to get more of a crime story.  The first chapter is a description of the growing storm.  These are the kinds of near-thrilling paragraphs  that MacDonald excels at, grabbing you with the captain of a freighter in the Caribean looking at the water and recognizing the signs, then zooming out to the geography and science of a growing hurricane.  We move to the human scale next, in classic JdM manner, with a neat structure of various cars passing each other on the highway heading North on the Gulf side of Florida.  As each car passes another, we get a chapter about that person's background: the family with the defeated father who are moving back north after failing to make it in Florida; the aggressive businessman with his belittled business partner, the widow with the ashes of her manic-depress husband who had recently killed himself, the failed tennis pro and his heiress bride, the two escaped cons and their cow-like girl in tow and finally the hard as nails fed who has finally found the last spy of the cell that blew up his wife.  

There are a lot of characters!  I thought we were going to have a book mainly focused around the tensions and conflict of these characters trapped somewhere in the storm, but as they only finally get stuck together well past the halfway mark, I realized it was more of a troupe story with the storm and its destruction as the main conflict.  Fine by me.  MacDonald keeps them clear for the reader and I only once or twice had to refer back to remind myself which was which.  It's a short, efficient book and he satisfies all their narrative arcs with an extremely moving romantic storyline as well.  This really is a tight, fun read.  He gives you everything you want with both the characters and the physical action of the storm.  That shit seems really terrifying!  It's not in depth but for instance, he spends a gleeful two pages describing the wealthy people's waterfront properties and how the storm first destroys their sea walls and then the houses themselves.  Thoroughly enjoyable, though honestly at one point, given how we are accelerating these disasters with our addiction to empty fossil-fuel driven consumption and you don't have to be in Florida or on the coast to have your life destroyed, I did have moments of real father anxiety while reading.

Dark fucking times, but on a Fifty Books note my project of reading all the Ed Gorman recommended non-Travis McGee books ended perfectly.

The part about the fish got my hyped.  JdM so good.