There are 18 novels in the Lew Archer series, and this is number 8. It’s one of the four chosen by the Library of America for their Ross Macdonald collection — the same four I would have picked, based on my reading of the eight so far. It’s terrific. I feel sad. It’s got to be downhill from here.

The plot is launched when an aged millionaire hires Archer, through her lawyer, to find the son who left the family under unpleasant circumstances decades before. She’s dying, and wants to reconcile first. But the man Archer turns up isn’t the missing son, but a young man who looks and sounds just like him and claims to be his son, though he grew up far away and never knew his father, the missing heir. The son seems honest enough, but his story is suspicious, the criminal underground seems always to be on the edge of the picture, and there are tens of millions of dollars in inheritance at stake. Is the boy a ringer in a con years in the making? And whose are the headless bones found under a housing development on the coast of the South Bay?

The mystery seems to be resolved, and the client is satisfied. But Archer wants all the loose ends tied up. He makes an ill-advised trip to Nevada and ends up in the hospital; he spends the last half of the book making people wonder how many buses he got hit by. We’ve come a long way since the first Archer book, when he was knocked unconscious three times in 36 hours only to pop up repeatedly like an inflatable punching bag. He’s become a believable character. The tolerance for gray moral areas he picked up in the last book, The Doomsters, has stuck, too, and serves him well.

As with the previous two books in the series, I’d be happy to read this book again, just a few days after finishing it. The book’s plot is complex and ingenious, and the resolution throws a new light on everything that led up to it. And while elements of the story are grim, it’s not nihilist-bleak; it even ends, literally, on a hopeful note. ( )

Really liked it, fast-paced, well plotted Private Eye mystery ( )

Great Ross M. read. Archer investigating whether or not the apparent son of the rich heiress is really who he says he is, with lots of good characters, mobsters and so forth thrown in. ( )

Unexpected gem of a book. Lew Archer is hired to find the long missing son of a very rich woman. The case has twists and turns galore as well as a detective that manages the hard boiled thing while still making me like him. A great classic mystery ( )

Ah, Ross Macdonald. I'm becoming rather fond of him. Good I discovered him. He gives a nice break from re-reading Raymond Chandler endlessly.

This plot is rather convoluted, so I'll only touch on a bit. A rich old lady, Maria Galton, thinks herself to be on the verge of death. Before that happens, she wants to reconnect with her son, and grandson, both of whom disappeared some 20 years previously. The son was a bit of a beatnick, ran off to San Francisco with a young woman he had impregnated and started writing poetry, or something. Whatever, no one has seen hide no hair of him since. So, Mrs. Galton's lawyer, Gordon Sable, hires Lew Archer to find the missing relatives.

Eventually, through a series of coincidences, perhaps intentionally directed ones, Archer finds that the son and grandson lived for a time in a place called Luna Bay, but then disappeared in the night, so to speak. After several rounds of interactions with mobsters and other shady characters, not to mention the knifing of Sable's houseman in front of Sable's unstable young wife, Archer figures out that the, now deceased, houseman also has some ties to Luna Bay.

Then, a young man shows up, claiming to be the missing grandson. He says that he had been living in an orphanage in Ohio, but escaped at 16 or so and found refuge with a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where the young man studied and graduated (I think he got a degree). But, there's a problem. How to prove the young man's story. The orphanage in Ohio had long since burned down, and its records with it. Then too, the young man shows hints of pronunciation and spelling more in keeping with his having been brought up in Canada than in Ohio.

Well, things go on, people die and get beat up. Eventually, Archer figures it all out. Really a quite fun story if you're at all into hard-boiled, noir, detective fiction, i.e. the stuff of Raymond Chandler and old Humphrey Bogart films. ( )