Like the other McGee novels, The Empty Copper Sea is a Cook's tour of the shadier side of the Sunshine State. We meet its Sun Belt aristocracy of bankers, contractors, insurance agents and big-money operators, and its confused underclass of retirees in mobile homes and condos, drifters with dark tans and darker notions, and the restive, frustrated middle class. Most of all, we meet people who in one way or another are sticking it to other people….

[MacDonald's] is not a cheerful view of the world. Everywhere he turns he sees crooks, corruption, venality, selfishness, stupidity—above all, the conscienceless rich socking it to a defenseless society. The disappearance of Hub Lawless, the yachting businessman, sets off a chain of events that affects almost everyone in Timber Bay; the novel is really about "all the people who get hurt when somebody sets up a conspiracy to defraud."

That...