Dark family secrets. How Ross Macdonald managed to get so many great books out of those three words is a wonderful mystery. This late novel featuring Macdonald's private eye Lew Archer is complicated yet compelling reading. The characters are so many and so convolutedly connected that they can easily be hard to tell apart. The denouement was surprising at a point where I though most of the surprises were over. Hired to find a runaway girl, Archer gets involved with a psychotic young man out to avenge his father's murder, a kidnapping, and other murders both recent and ancient. This is a fast-paced and enjoyable entry in the Archer series. ( )

"Hell, I could even retire. The possibility jarred me. I had to admit to myself that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city's great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before i died, if I made all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive. Like the Bride of Frankenstein." (pg. 127)

"I had a second slug to fortify my nerves. Then I got Mrs. Marburg's check out of the safe. I tore it into small pieces and tossed the yellow confetti out the window. It drifted down on the short hairs and the long hairs, draft dodgers and dollar chasers, swingers and walking wounded, idiot saints, hard cases, foolish virgins." (end of book- pg. 240)

Just two great quotes from this great book. Why 4 stars? A bit too complicated for me ... maybe i should have adjusted my variable reading style (sometimes reading 3 days apart- very disjointed). Hard to keep the many characters and family relations together. Still - pretty great! Cain and Abel story... ( )

Yet another good Ross Macdonald. It is rather convoluted, and has some weirdly tangled family relationships, but fun and quite good.

Lew Archer is hired by Keith Sebastian to find his daughter Alexandra (Sandy), who apparently has run off with a rather wild boy, Davy Spanner, along with her father's shot gun.

Davy has had rather a troubled time of life. It seems that he was found by the train tracks, at the age of three, next to a decapitated corpse. The corpse was presumed to have been his father, but it was unclear whether he was murdered or committed suicide. Davy's mother vanished about that time and he was brought up by foster parents.

Anyway, Archer digs into Davy's past, finding a high-school guidance counselor who keeps trying to help, finding the ex-cop who was supposed to have investigated the railroad accident, finding a woman who appears to have taken Davy in—gave him a sort of job and housing. Has she also taken Davy into her bed?

Well, there are lots of other loose ends which may be related. It seems that Keith Sebastian's boss's father was murdered on the beach around the time Davy's dad met his fate at the hands of the train; Keith Sebastian's boss himself seems to have a rather controlling mother, and so forth. Oh yeah, the boss is kidnapped, perhaps by Davy and Sandy.

Well, it's convoluted, but rather fun, as is generally the case with a Ross Macdonald novel.
( )

I didn't care for this one as much as some of the other Archer books, maybe because the people Archer is working for were all so unpleasant. ( )

I have to agree with the New York Times when it says that this book "moves fast and is full of surprises." The ending of this book was astonishing as the revelations kept coming, and the path that took the characters to this surprise-a-minute ending is one that the reader is quickly drawn into following. The back-cover blurb is slightly misleading in that it plays up the sex angle more than it appears in the book. The book's treatment of the sex crime angle is a revelation consisting of one or two sentences, spoken by the victim, and her blunt statement of the facts makes them even more horrifying than they would be if the sex crime had been written about in grim detail for pages on end.

This is recommended for fans of Lew Archer, particularly the really twisty installments like The Drowning Pool or The Galton Case. ( )