My Brother’s Widow by John D. MacDonald

Book Details

For four years Gevan Dean was in self-imposed exile from his family business, the business he had run until his brother stole his fiancee. Now his brother had been murdered and Gevan needed to know why.

My Brother’s Widow – For four years, Gevan Dean had refused to face Niki, the woman who’d hurt him. But now he had to—because her husband, Gevan’s brother, had been murdered

Part 2 – I couldn’t put off meeting Niki any longer, and maybe I didn’t want to. I’d have to meet Mottling, too—the big man who was running my business

Part 3 – When I saw what we were manufacturing in C Building, it gave me the shudders; we were making the trigger assembly for hell. And Colonel Dolson, the Army man on the job, was playing a secret game of his own

Part 4 – Alma Bradey knew something, but she didn’t want to talk. I made her talk though; I made her tell me something she shouldn’t have told anybody—if she wanted to live

Part 5 – I was a boy playing a man’s game. And I’d stuck my neck out so far I couldn’t dodge the bullets

John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) was one of the best crime and mystery writers of the era. His most famous creation was his series of Travis McGee books. My Brother’s Widow was serialized in Colliers Weekly in 1952.

My Brother’s Widow  contains 9 illustrations.

Files:

1. MyBrothersWidow.epub

My Brother’s Widow is also available on Barnes & Noble

Excerpt: My Brother’s Widow

Chapter I

I  WOKE up with that queer feeling of disorientation an unfamiliar bed gives you; woke up in a room too small, and too still. It took long seconds to remember that this was George Tarleson’s cruiser, the Vunderbar, that I had borrowed it at noon of the day before, Saturday noon, telling George that I had fishing on my mind, whereas my prime motive had been to get away from the Tarlesons’ usual noisy weekend house party.

My small beach house is within a few hundred yards of their big house at Indian Rocks Beach. During the first year of my stay there, I had good reason to want the gay life. My house became the scene of a sort of endless party. For the next two years I merely endured the parties, and during the past year, my fourth year in Florida, I had tried to escape as often as possible.

I had trolled on up north and found a secluded mangrove-bordered bay near Dunedin Isles and dropped the hook, far enough from shore to avoid the bugs.

I pulled on swimming trunks and padded out on deck. It was a silver-gray Sunday morning. Mullet jumped nearby, rippling the surface. The water was clear enough and deep enough, so I balanced on the stern rail and dived in, letting the April water, still cool from winter, drive away the last mistiness of long sleep. I swam hard until I was winded, and then floated. The Vunderbar was a toy boat on display in a shop window. There was a certain satisfaction in being as brown as waxed mahogany, so brown that my sun-bleached hair and eyebrows were paler than my skin—a morsel of satisfaction to weigh against the vague stirrings of discontent.

Midge and George had the usual crowd at their party. My group, I suppose—the blue-denim set, twice as busy in idleness as they would have been if they were working. Whenever I found myself feeling vaguely superior, I told myself that all my little makework projects in the area were just window trimming. All I actually had to do was sit. My inheritance of eight thousand shares of Dean Products stock, the family enterprise, brought in an average annual dividend of eight dollars a share.

On this particular party, Midge Tarleson had been trying, as usual, to pair me off with somebody she considered suitable. This one had been pretty enough, but with that lost look in her gray eyes, that rebound look that bachelors learn to identify quickly. If they don’t, they lose their bachelorhood.

Once, in an unguarded moment, I told Midge Tarleson just enough of my personal emotional history to make her want to cure me by marrying me off. But, much to her annoyance, I have singled out only those little girls who want no entanglements, and have avoided the lost-looking ones.

Without trying too hard, I had achieved that Great American Dream —money and idleness. And with it had come a sense of guilt, as though I had been accused of some unspecified crime. I suspected that my playmates felt that way too, oftener than they would admit. Our little group had begun to have a faint aroma of decay.

The world was spinning toward some unthinkable destination, and we sat in the sand with our buckets and castles. It was better to be alone—a condition that I was arranging with increasing regularity. This was the Florida I loved.

Excerpt From: John D. MacDonald. “My Brother’s Widow.”