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    The Green Ripper: A Travis McGee Novel
    Unavailable
    The Green Ripper: A Travis McGee Novel
    Unavailable
    The Green Ripper: A Travis McGee Novel
    Ebook240 pages3 hours

    The Green Ripper: A Travis McGee Novel

    By John D. MacDonald and Lee Child

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From a beloved master of crime fiction, The Green Ripper is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat.
     
    Travis McGee has known his share of beautiful girls, but true love always passed him by—until Gretel. Life aboard the Busted Flush has never been so sweet. But suddenly, Gretel dies of an unidentified illness—or so he’s told. Convinced that the woman who stole his heart has been murdered, McGee finds himself pursuing a less-than-noble cause: revenge.
     
    “To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”—Kurt Vonnegut
     
    McGee has lost not only the love of his life but also his last hope for stability. Soon grief turns to blinding rage. So when he finds the people responsible for Gretel’s death, McGee goes off the rails—and off the grid, three thousand miles from home.
     
    McGee emerges in the California woods as Tom McGraw, a fisherman looking for his long-lost daughter. This mysterious newcomer starts knocking off targets one by one. But as he pursues his single-minded crusade for justice, he becomes more and more unhinged. McGee has spent his life saving other people, but now he’ll need to find the strength to save himself—before he loses his mind.
     
    Features a new Introduction by Lee Child
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateJan 8, 2013
    ISBN9780307826794
    Unavailable
    The Green Ripper: A Travis McGee Novel

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    Reviews for The Green Ripper

    4/5

    162 ratings11 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I had been building up to this episode, having heard it was the one where Travis goes berserk. It wasn't quite as I expected. Taking up where the last book left off, Travis is enjoying his time with the girl of his dreams. Of course, his dreams aren't meant to last. And when he finds out someone was responsible for her death, his sole mission is to seek them out. How he does so is a bit improbable, but the focus and intensity of this book win out over the often rambling tales MacDonald tends to spin. We have known all along that McGee is a killer. Here, he gets to practice it for a good cause. This book, published in 1979, seems much more contemporary, although the face of terrorism has changed a bit since it was written. And it has more than its share of gloom and doom, whether it is Meyer's forecasts of economic collapse in as soon as five years or the seeming certainty that terrorism and bloodbaths are on their way--well, maybe it got that part right. it just took a little bit longer. Still, we don't read McGee to be uplifted, so as a reader, we just sort of nod our heads and keep reading. At least for a moment, the good guys can win. And for once, there is no ambiguity about whether McGee is a good guy or not, although MacDonald cops out a bit when it comes to his dealings with the female terrorists. Definitely a change of pace for the series, and a definitely needed one--despite the events that initiated it.
    • 4/5
      The Green Ripper continues from Travis's love interest in The Empty Copper Sea, Gretel, they're planning a life together until she is murdered. At this point Travis embarks on a mission of revenge to find the person responsible. It's definitely one of the more violent McGee books, however the additional violence felt very much in place and not merely added for the sake of it. Builds to an excellent ending, maybe the best book in the series so far, Tan & Sandy Silence seemed to have been a low point in the series and everything following has been better.
    • 4/5
      Make sure that you first read the previous book in this series, The Empty Copper Sea, as this one follows that more than the McGee books normally do.While I found this a satisfying quick read, I am beginning to feel that being one of McGee's female friends is a precarious position! Talk about 'unlucky in love'!
    • 5/5
      "The Green Ripper" is probably the tightest, most focused, of all the 21 Travis McGee novels. The title is what a young child thinks he hears when adults are talking about the Grim Reaper. And, that's exactly what comes and takes away Gretel, without whom all the time seemed "leaden and endless." She was the one who made Travis, that beach bum who trawled the waters off Florida in his 52foot houseboat ("The Busted Flush"), forget all about the girls of summer. When she dies quickly of a mysterious disease, he falls into great despair, but what happens when he figures out that Greta only died when she stumbled on a mysterious cult and saw something she wasn't supposed to see.
      This novel was written in the late seventies when Jim Jones was busy brainwashing hundreds of people and the remnants of the Patty Hearst years and the Symbionese Liberation Army had not yet been forgotten. But, it is still relevant today in a world where crazy Jihadis are bent on destroying Western civilization. It is a terrific novel which pits a lone McGee against a worldwide cult set on blowing up modern civilization. What can this one lone treasure hunter/ beach bum do against a highly trained army of religious fanatics? It is, simply put, a terrific adventure story.
    • 5/5
      A premonition off the terrorism that has focused the worlds attention for the last couple of decades. Travis talks about luck and demonstrates skill. Perhaps the morose thoughts Travis exhibits reflect MacDonald’s own aging. I now know the area around Ukiah and L lake city, I didn’t when I read this when it first came out. A pleasure to revisit the story, Travis, and Meyer.
    • 4/5
      McGee's investigation into the suspicious death of his most recent lover leads him to search for a mysterious religious cult in northern California, which turns out to be a front for a massive terrorist organization. Pretty grim stuff here, and his friend Meyer's gloomy predictions (a frightening number of which have come to pass since the book's 1979 publication date) don't help the overall downer tone.
    • 5/5
      THE GREEN RIPPER (1980) by John D. MacDonald finds our hero, Travis McGee, in a dark state of mind. His woman (girlfriend doesn’t come close to describing the deep bond between the two) dies suddenly after seeing a sinister religious cult figure she happened to see years before. Travis, almost destroyed by his loss, decides there is only one course of action. He must write out his will, leave sunny Florida behind, cross the country and track down the hidden figures who killed her.This is a darker book than normal, Travis a bitter avenger, but the writing is consistently of the high standard expected from MacDonald. While the book might be almost 40 years old, it could have been written today and been just as truthful.If you haven’t read any of the McGee novels, start with the first in the series. All are stand alone tales, so you do not necessarily have to read from the beginning, but once you start in you’ll wish you had, just for the sheer pleasure of seeing a master writer growing in his powers.
    • 4/5
      Another great book by John D. McDonald. This one is better then the last couple. Good read.
    • 4/5
      McGee has decided that maybe, at last, he's found the Real Thing with Gretel, but then she's ruthlessly murdered -- worse, he and Meyer discover this is just one of a long series of killings involved with the plans of anarchistic revolutionaries hiding behind the mask of a religious cult, the Church of the Apocrypha. Except that, of course, the revolutionaries are actually being run by far more sinister forces . . . In due course, McGee infiltrates one of their armed training camps, and after that it becomes a question of kill or be killed.

      This is the most violent of the Travis McGee novels I can remember reading -- although it's been a long while since last I did so, so maybe the others have a similar body-count!
    • 2/5
      Since I haven't read the entire series, I don't have any sense of who Gretel is, but certainly she comes across as a life-changing person for Travis McGee. If this is so, and she's not just another of his endless succession of boat bunnies, this is a very sad book.At first the book gives the sensation that McGee is going to take on an international global conspiracy. That never goes very well in a book with only a couple of hundred pages; the author tends to spend several pages explaining how careful and secret the organization is, and then the secret agent waltzes in and cleans everyone out. Luckily, whatever the followup is, McGee is content to only take on a small unit of the conspiracy. Even then, MacDonald feels the need to point out that he had to be extremely lucky to make it out alive. Travis works much better when he's bumming around on his boat in Florida.
    • 4/5
      McGee fans generally agree this one is separated from other McGee books for two reasons: the religious cult and the flavor of spiritual, and mostly because Gretal is the woman we wish McGee would have married for the rest of the series. In fact, I have patterned June in the 22nd McGee chronicle I'm writing after Gretal, at lest physically.