Books like Where is Janice Gantry?

An odd entry in the John D. MacDonald canon, with a hero who seems like a trial run for Travis McGee and a plot that spends less time on the title question than on figuring out whether the hero can redeem himself. Yet it was still pretty entertaining, with vivid characters, sassy dialogue and tantalizing descriptions of early 1960s Florida beach life.The hero and narrator is Sam Brice, a one-time NFL star who was booted from the league under a cloud and was promptly dumped by his high-maintenance glamour-girl wife as well. He's crawled back to his hometown in Florida, where he broods on what he's lost and runs a small auto-damage appraisal operation. He shares office space with another business, and has a torrid but ultimately pointless affair with the title character, Janice Gantry. She wants marriage and children, and he doesn't, so the affair ends.When the book begins, a guy Brice knows slightly has escaped from a prison road gang after two years behind bars, and has now showed up at his door looking for help. Brice lets him stay at his beachfront cabin overnight and gives him something to eat. At one point, Brice mentions that perhaps the only person in town who believes the guy is innocent is Janice Gantry. When the escaped prisoner leaves, Brice sees him picked up by Gantry -- and that's the last anyone sees of them.While the cops search for the missing pair, Brice begins his own investigation, but he doesn't get very far until he's confiding in a neighbor named D. Ackley Bush. D. Ackley is one of the best characters MacDonald ever created, a well-educated local gadfly who delights in swapping gossip and tormenting local politicians. Every Florida beach town has at least one D. Ackley Bush in it. He steers Brice toward a new angle, which leads to Brice beginning a romance with a visiting tourist named Peggy who's the sister of Bush's mysterious neighbors, the Webers -- the people the escaped inmate was caught burglarizing two years before.After that most of the story is taken up with Brice falling in love with Peggy and vice versa, which is a ton of fun but way off the beam for the plot. Eventually, though, the mystery and the love affair cross paths again, and Brice is called upon to do some very Travis McGee-like things to save himself and his lady love. MacDonald manages to wrap the whole thing up in fewer than 200 pages.All in all, I'm glad Brice wasn't the character that MacDonald built his series around, but his one-shot novel is an interesting look at what MacDonald was thinking about. In one fun twist, the bad guys actually talk about fleeing town and holing up at a marina on the other side of the state -- the Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale, where McGee later anchored his boat.