A rich guy's daughter went missing for some time - she practically disappeared from the face of the Earth. After two months her father realized something is off and hired Lew Archer to find her. One of his main conditions for the search: Archer should not try to get in touch with his ex-wife and girl's mother. This precaution seems to be fairly prophetic as the moment Archer tried to do so he began finding dead bodies. For me this was the book which finally made me say that Ross Macdonald is the grand-master when it comes to this particular trope: According to one of my friends who read his biography, Macdonald grew up in not what one would call a perfect family exactly, so he knew first-hand some of the things he wrote about. His experience helped him create believable dysfunctional families with a lot of rot and corruption underneath the glamour cover and plenty of said skeletons in the proverbial closets. This is a good page-turner with complicated plot, but if I want to do a minor nitpicking I would mention some very occasional slowdowns of the plot. My final rating is 4 very solid stars.
“She was trouble looking for somebody to happen to.” A classic detective noir set up: The daughter of a rich man is missing. Lew Archer is hired to track her down. Archer is given all sorts of personal family areas he's not supposed to investigate. Just find the girl. I think we all know he's going to investigate those areas and I think we all know that nobody is going to like what he finds there.I don't know what I found so entrancing about this book. Ross Macdonald was truly at the top of this craft when he wrote it. It's not that he does anything outrageous or even particularly unique here. This sort of "find the girl" story has been told a million times. It's just that Ross Macdonald may just have been one of the best one's who ever told it. It's like John Ford doing Westerns. Watching a master craftsman at the top of this craft is a pure literary joy.So much of high class "literature" could learn a great deal from the mixture of harshness and delicacy in which Macdonald treats his characters. Fantastic art can still be fun. Macdonald proved it.
I picked this one up at the strong recommendation of a Goodreads friend, and I was well-rewarded. It is about as perfect as a private-eye novel could be; the characters are strong and well-described, the plot is complex and perfect in its execution. I have never been led down the garden path (along with the detective) so many times in a single book. Yet it all made perfect sense in the end. Lew Archer is hired by a very wealthy and very strange man to find his missing daughter, although he is ordered never to approach her mother, now divorced from the father. Of course he ignores this requirement, gradually uncovering layer after layer of duplicity. The family is (to take a metaphor from the book) like one of those chocolate apples that break into pieces when you tap them. I don't think anybody in the book tells him the truth without either a twist or an omission, and yet very gradually he teases it out, always several steps ahead of me. The milieu is not a pleasant one, but in this morally complex environment there are characters to pity and those to admire, at least partially.
—Jon
Not as horribly sad a book as the previous, with pretty much (view spoiler)[people getting what they deserve, for the most part.petty blackmailers just can't do it for me. (hide spoiler)]
—Ubiquitousbastard
To me, this is a strong entry in the Lew Archer series, possibly inspired, in part, by Ross MacDonald's troubled daughter. Lew Archer is hired to find a missing young woman named Phoebe Wycherly, and the case takes him to San Francisco where his search quickly involves him with shady real eastate speculators and other members of Phoebe's dysfunctional family.Archer works his way through the intricate plot, reaching the truth in final, shattering pages. The detective story framework allows MacDonald a powerful template for a look at real people and complex human themes.
—Sidney
