Harper & Row

A seventeen-year-old boy tries to establish his identity by evaluating the events and people that have influenced him in the past.

While camping in the Adirondacks, teenage best friends Doug and Loop fall in with Ernie and her belligerent brother, as a Soviet missile attack heralds the beginning of a dangerous war with biological weapons and the entire country enters a state of chaotic emergency conditions.

Travis McGee investigates when a small cruiser owned by his friend, Meyer the Economist, is blown to bits with Meyer's niece and her new husband on board.

Fifteen-year-old Eugene Dingman records in his personal diary his summer spent as a waiter in a hotel in the Adirondacks, learning to cope with rejection from the girl he has a crush on as well as from his own father.