Nightmare in Pink: A Travis McGee Novel

By John D. MacDonald and Lee Child

From a beloved master of crime fiction, Nightmare in Pink is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
 
Travis McGee’s permanent address is the Busted Flush, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale, and there isn’t a hell of a lot that compels him to leave it. Except maybe a call from an old army buddy who needs a favor. If it wasn’t for him, McGee might not be alive. For that kind of friend, Travis McGee will travel almost anywhere, even New York City. Especially when there’s a damsel in distress.
 
“As a young writer, all I ever wanted was to touch readers as powerfully as John D. MacDonald touched me.”—Dean Koontz
 
The damsel in question is his old friend’s kid sister, whose fiancé has just been murdered in what the authorities claim was a standard Manhattan mugging. But Nina knows better. Her soon-to-be husband had been digging around, finding scum and scandal at his real estate investment firm. And this scum will go to any lengths to make sure their secrets don’t get out.
 
Travis is determined to get to the bottom of things, but just as he’s closing in on the truth, he finds himself drugged and taken captive. If he’s being locked up in a mental institution with a steady stream of drugs siphoned into his body, how can Travis keep his promise to his old friend? More important, how can he get himself out alive?
 
Features a new Introduction by Lee Child

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9780307827265

Reviews for Nightmare in Pink

[ikeman100 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the second book I've read by MacDonald. Not quite as good as the first Travis McGee but still worth reading. Looking forward to the third.

[henrimoreaux · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nightmare in Pink is the second Travis McGee book, and I felt it was an improvement over the first. The action takes place in a new locale, namely New York, and Travis is drawn in to investigate the death of a soldier buddy's wife's partner who was mysteriously mugged and killed after claiming there were irregularities at his work.Pretty good ending.

[eclipse777-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Some outdated attitude towards women in this one, got a bit boring with nearly every woman in the story jumped into bed with him and one of the weakest of the Travis books I didn’t particularly like how he got out of a fix towards the end it was more luck then skill, I give that it was written such a long time ago and I really shouldn’t compare it to today’s attitudes.

saying that I still quite enjoyed reading about Travis and I loved the creepy mental asylum he visits.

[dmatty5 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Travis McGee books should be set in Florida. This one takes place in New York City. Pretty good story, but...

[kmartin802_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Mike Gibson was an Army buddy of Travia McGee's when they both served in Korea. Mike was blinded and otherwise injured and is in a VA hospital. He gives McGee a call and asks for a favor: his sister's fiancé was mugged and died, and he wants Travis to help her out. Travis will do anything for his old friend and heads off to New York City. Travis is taking his retirement a little at a time. He takes a job when he needs some money and then retires until he needs funds again. He's a sort of knight errant in tarnished armor. He'll help someone who needs him in exchange for half of what he recovers. Nina Gibson has some questions about her fiancé. After his death, she finds $10 thousand in a shoe box and doesn't know how he came by the money. As Travis begins to look he discovers a complex financial scheme going on. Some con artists are taking a wealthy guy for millions which means that Travis might have gotten in over his head. Travis stumbles into trouble and finds himself in a hospital where illegal experiments are going on. He's been dosed with an LSD-like potion and learns that the wealthy guy had had the same thing done to him before he had a lobotomy. He manages to get out, leaving a trail of bodies behind him, and gains a bit paycheck from the wealthy guy's wife. He also gets the girl - at least temporarily. Travis McGee is a character I first met in 1972 when I was riding Greyhound busses between graduate school and my hometown. He was an interesting sort of hero. He has a strong moral center, but it isn't conventional morality. His attitude toward women reads more than a little chauvinistic at a 50 year remove. But still, if a person is in really bad trouble, Travis McGee would still be my choice of a hero to call upon. I enjoyed this walk down memory lane. The narration was well done.

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Early entry in what would be a long-running series. tough guy Travis McGee enforces his own brand of justice by forcing crooks to hand over half heir profits. in tis case the sexy sister of a friend has a link to high financial evil. At one point McGee ends up drugged a crooked mental hospital ( a favorite nightmare of mine) but he gets out killing several people with the place's illegal drugs in the process. In his day McGee was apparently intended to be gallant but his descriptions of women are grossly sexist by current standards. I like him more when I was a sex-starved adolescent.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Pretty good read. Nothing that rocked my world, but a decent plot likable protagonist ... generally the type of book that is cool for escapism without total thoughtlessness or bad taste. I liked it.

[jimmaclachlan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not positive of the edition as this is an OLD Random House one. Years ago I bought the tapes used from the library & converted them into an audio files. I only put the title & author into the file name & there isn't anything in the file themselves beyond it being a Random House recording. I threw the tapes away when we moved. The story is definitely abridged & if you come across it, run away. McGee usually tells the story, but there are a couple of jarring spots where an entire conversation with a person is condensed into a narrator's summary. It SUCKS!!!

Abridging a book can be a good thing. For instance, cutting out the third of Moby Dick cutting up the whale is a kindness. Abridging one of MacDonald's McGee books is like trying to make a full meal for 2 out of a cheeseburger. There just isn't enough there to make it worthwhile. The original paperback was only 143 pages! It makes me wish there was a way to ding the publisher on the star rating for this boondoogle, but I'm going to ignore it on rating the book. It's not MacDonald's fault.

I had a big problem with the setup, unfortunately. Trav has to talk Nina into letting him help. That part went fine, but once she was onboard, she comes up with all kinds of information that directly opposes her previous assertions. She said the money couldn't have anything to do with her fiancee's death, then tells Trav about all the odd things going on at his job & all his suspicions. It just doesn't ring true at all. After that the book hums along like a well oiled machine, though. It's definitely a good one, even better than the first. That it could be so good even with ham-fisted editing is amazing.

One of the best things about these books is, although they're a series, a person could as easily have started with this book as the first one. Enough of McGee's history & lifestyle comes through to paint him perfectly without boring the reader of others in the series. That's a very rare find.

Overall, I'd give this 3.5 stars. I'll round up to 4, even though I wasn't thrilled with the start & the reader wasn't great. His female voices suck, but at least he wasn't irritating for the most part.

[leslie398 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I am undecided whether I like this series. The style is more of a hard-boiled mystery (not my favorite sub-genre) and the 1960s feel to the books is strong (especially regarding sex). However, Travis McGee himself I find intriguing -- he is the missing link between Robin Hood and the TV show Leverage.

[willymammoth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like all Travis McGee novels, "Nightmare in Pink" spins a yarn about the consumate boat bum as he undertakes yet another adventure to right the wrongs of a crooked society--for a modest fee, of course. This time the story centers around a batch of high-rise con artists who use LSD and lobotomies to carry out their crimes. The first half of the book consists mostly of legwork and wordy ruminations on the crummy state of the female psyche and the crummy state of the world in general. It would be tiresome if McDonald wasn't so darn good at it. His prose is nothing if not elegant. Some might be turned off by the way the narrative at times devolves into an internal monologue from McGee, but when it's done with adequate skill I don't particularly mind. And as in all McGee novels, the man uses his awesome powers of lovemaking to take a damaged woman or two and nurse them back to mental health. If you don't have much experience with John D. MacDonald's works, you probably won't be bothered by it. If you're a MacDonald veteran it can get a bit old hat, but the rest of the novel more than makes up for it.The meat of the story--and where MacDonald does some of his best writing--occurs when McGee is falsely imprisoned within a mental hospital. I'll spare you the spoilers, but suffice to say that MacDonald's descriptions of trippy drug experiences and mental hospital horror are well worth the price of admission. The ending isn't surprising, but the author skillfully maneuvers the plot such that it's still a fun ride.

[datrappert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An old war buddy, now paralyzed and blind in a North Carolina Veterans Hospital, asks McGee to look into the death of his younger sister's fiancee, who left a large sum of money of mysterious origin. The first two-thirds of the story are more about McGee's philosophy of women, sex, love, architecture, and whatever else he ruminates on--with the emphasis on his analysis of the female psyche. It is all more than a bit tiring and you wonder when the story is going to pick up. Then it jerks itself into motion and the last third of the book is a drug-induced roller coaster that saves the novel from failure.After two rounds with McGee, I can honestly say that he is a true bastard, despite his occasional good deeds. He succeeds as a hero in this book and in the Deep Blue Goodbye (the first novel in the series) because he is butting heads with folks who are much bigger bastards than he is -- child molesters, white collar criminals, and lobotomists, just to name a few (sometimes the categories overlap). I wonder if the remainder of the series will continue to be as dark and depressing as the first two.

[cknikka · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Still think 1964 only this time our hero is in New York at the behest of an old Korean War buddy to check on the friend’s daughter. It is an interesting story that strikes a cord with today... There is some great lines that I identify with as a social worker. Maybe I should be a P.I.? "There is only one way to make people talk more than they care to. Listen. Listen with hungry earnest attention to every word. In the intensity of your attention, make little nods of agreement, little sounds of approval. You can't fake it. You have to really listen. In a posture of gratitude. And it is such a rare and startling experience for them, such a boon to ego, such a gratification of self, to find a genuine listerner, that they want to prolong the experience. And the only way to do that is to keep talking. A good listener is far more rare than an adequate lover." hummm I think Carl Rodgers could not have said it better. Another one to have fun with!

[andyray_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

in this second novel of travis mcgee's adventures, he experiences the weirdness of an LSD trip. One wonders how JDM could portray such a trip, knowing he wrote as much as he could from his experience. Hm. Good story.

[linkmeister · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

McGee reluctantly does a favor for his best friend, a permanently wounded Army vet. The veteran's sister Nina has lost her fiancé to a senseless mugging in NY, and she's not holding up well. Turns out he was working for a company which was systematically looting millions from a very wealthy guy, and he was trying to blow the whistle internally.The lawyers and accountants behind the scheme have ties to a medical center in upstate NY where doctors are experimenting with mind-altering drugs including LSD; they lobotomized the wealthy guy whose estate is being looted to keep him happy while they continue to steal.McGee is trapped by the bad guys and dosed with acid himself; he manages to escape through luck or faulty drug dispensation, and the plot is uncovered.This is the second McGee book and it's far from the best, but it's still pretty good. We're treated to more of McGee's thoughts about society here. At one point he's walking the streets of Manhattan and is bumped by a fellow pedestrian who snarls at him, and this takes him off into a theory about New York being the place where society breaks down -- instead of mere snarls at some point the bumper and bumpee will be at each others' throats; onlookers follow along, and soon all urban centers will be jungles with the smarter predators hunting one another through the streets.

[tripleblessings_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Travis McGee meets Nina, a wanton career girl in Manhattan, who offers the first clue to a swindle so gigantic it took a whole army of lawyers and financiers to keep it secret. The chase takes McGee into the world of the Cafe Society, the ruthless world of really big money, and hallucinatory drugs.