This is book 20 of the "Travis McGee" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Number 19 for McGee, next to last. Another dark one, with a crazed serial killer with a moderately tragic origin story.

Starts with a bang, too, as Meyer's cruiser the John Maynard Keynes is blown up. He's not aboard, he's in Toronto lecturing (and recovering from the previous book, where he got broken down pretty thoroughly), and his niece and husband are borrowing the boat for their honeymoon.

Meyer gets angry, and recovers a lot too. He and Travis go on the trail of what happened, and find out that the new husband is a serial killer with a very plausible manner for short periods. And that he probably wasn't on the boat (there's a hired hand on board that the captain wouldn't have hired if the husband had been there to help out).

They end up down in Mexico, working with a Mayan princess to see he gets killed off. Which they do, but just barely, of course.

Meanwhile, Travis has missed saying goodbye to his girlfriend, who has gotten a much better job with her hotel chain, managing a property in Hawaii.

The jacket photos are making me think of Meyer, somehow (though you can't see if MacDonald has a pelt like a bear).