This is book 9 of the "Travis McGee" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

The ninth Travis McGee book. And a jump all the way to 1968, a multi-year gap in a series that had been having multiple books per year.

A friend of Travis' has been killed as part of a land deal. Travis takes offense at this, and arranges to hurt the vaious major players in the deal even worse (in the way that hurts such people most: cost them money). And he manages to make a profit on it.

Essentially, he runs his own con operation against them. Meyer helps a lot.