The Last One Left by John D. MacDonald

He stood in the night shadows watching the traffic.  He had an awareness of all the weight of the night city around him, of all the animal tensions of this single moment in time in this place, a shrewd and tawdry city, shining like toyland between the swamps and the sea.
--John D. MacDonald, The Last One Left (Random House, 1967).

Stephen King recently praised this book in The New York Times, in which he said MacDonald's Travis McGee novels were "embarrassingly dated" and his other novels were "an indigestible mixture of Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara."  I disagree with King:  I read the Travis McGee novels every few years and always find them relevant, intense and beautifully written, combining a feeling for Florida with an understanding of the people who live there.  But read them for yourself and see what you think.  As for MacDonald's other novels, there are undoubtedly influences of the writers King mentions but I feel strongly that MacDonald transcends these influences to create a distinctive style.  Judge for yourself.

King did single out for praise The Last One Left, possibly because it is more similar to King's work than most of MacDonald's other novels, with a more detailed plot and complex characters; it is also longer than most of MacDonald's other novels.  It has a somewhat unusual structure, it being well into the book before one discovers what is going on, while we get details about the lives of all the characters.  There is quite a collection of hustlers, boat people, Cuban refugees, and wheeler-dealers.  As the plot slowly evolves one learns that a high-priced hooker's sugar daddy has suddenly died and she is running out of money.  She seduces several men and enlists them in a plot to murder six people on a boat that is carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in money for bribes.  Her Cuban maid and the maid's reporter boyfriend catch wind of what's going on, as does a lawyer whose sister is one of the passengers on the doomed boat.

Like most of MacDonald's other novels The Last One Left works on multiple levels:  the details of the different lives of different classes in Florida, the working-out of the attempt to commit a perfect crime that leaves no witnesses, the complexities of the police investigation.  It is an examination of a specific crime at a specific time in a specific place, and all the people affected by it, in one way or another.