This is the first book I've read by this author and it will be quite a stretch to get me to read another. Only through sheer willpower did I convince myself to read halfway through this text in desperate search for a plot. The plot finally started to reveal itself, but it was so weak, I couldn't believe anyone would use it as the basis for a novel. I've got to confess - I never finished the book. I NEVER quit midstream in a book (I attacked Moby Dick three times before finishing it!), but I finally conceded that I had better uses for my time than trying to plod through the rest of this weak effort.

I'm an unashamed MacDonald acolyte. A completely biased fan. Seek objectivity elsewhere.

This is MacDonald's last published novel. He died soon and suddenly before paperback publication of this swiftly and briskly told entertainment, full of the utterly believable characterizations for which MacDonald has always been particularly esteemed.

MacDonald has always been a writer's writer. From Stephen King to Dean Koontz and just about every kind of popular novelist from this half of the century (and from more than a few highly-admired literary novelists), you can read unstinting praise for MacDonald. His work influenced and inspired over a generation of popular novelists, and in his particular specialty, the procedural crime thriller, he may well be peerless.

In Barrier Island, the plot may keep you turning the pages (another MacDonald specialty: by the time he reached his artistic maturity his tales unfolded with the spooky, organic precision of an amoeba digesting a bit of flotsam; not a seam or dumb loose end to be found); but it's the mastery of language (and through it the mastery of character) that makes the page-turning worth doing: in this, his last novel, MacDonald had honed his prose down to an almost austere simplicity that camoflages his enormous craft. MacDonald advanced as a writer through the evolution of his language. Even in some of his early novels there are moments of Art, with a capital "A," but here, in this last work, there is Art everywhere. The irony of this clean prose revealing the utter messiness of human affairs (about which MacDonald knew more than most), is part of what makes this novel Art, not just another light entertainment.

And it is this very quality of language that will have the last page resonating in your head and heart long after you've closed the back cover.