Word: old
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Everyone knows McGee's address, if not his destination. He is usually to be found at Slip F18, Bahia Mar, Fort Lauderdale, aboard The Busted Flush, the old tub he won in a poker game with "four pink ones up and a stranger down." Trav is calls himself a "salvage consultant," but his real business is not in maritime wreck age but rescuing lost souls and money. In recent years, starting with The Dreadful Lemon Sky (No. 16, 1975), McGee has had troubles of his own. He has become increasingly morose, and the cases he handled were no real...
...love this time around. Then Gretel, his live-aboard mate, dies a hot and horrible death, the victim of an inexplicable assassination. Desperate and half demented, McGee writes a note leaving all - The Busted Flush and Miss Agnes, the elderly "hand-hewn" Rolls-Royce pickup truck - to his old pal and counselor, Meyer, a famed economist who inhabits the next-door houseboat, John Maynard Keynes. The salvager plucks his life savings of $9,300 from a cache and becomes Tom McGraw, a retired fisherman. Following a ritual clue Gretel had given him a few days before dying, he heads...
...blown his cover. He has no choice but to blast his way out, killing all his captors-and nearly blowing his mind. It is the most intense and savage narrative that MacDonald has ever written. As for McGee, he recovers in time quite nicely in the arms of an old flame, en route home to Miss Agnes and The Busted Flush...
Urban killing is as old as cities; today, the accounts of street crime have grown so familiar that death has lost its sting. In a book that should prove this year's Helter Skelter, Crime Writer Clark Howard restores to this now routine event a primal horror. His pounding narrative meticulously describes the so-called Zebra killings of 1973-74, when 23 white San Franciscans were murdered or maimed by a group of Black Muslim extremists. In the retelling, the cold jargon of police files leaps starkly to life...
This blend of new and old was apparent at the Pearl River Fisheries Research Institute, where we saw mammoth carp that had been raised from tiny fry in the center's ponds. One innovation: the use of female hormones to encourage spawning. But the biologists there also adhered to the Maoist maxim to "change wastes into treasures and turn harmful into beneficial." They feed the fish animal and even human wastes (after fermentation to kill fecal parasites). Elsewhere, the Chinese are introducing "digesters" (small tanks) that convert biological wastes into methane gas, which in turn powers electrical generators...