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Rare Books
The blue hammer : a Lew Archer novel
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- Description
- "The theft of a valuable painting. The long-ago disappearance of a famous artist. A murder as deceptive as magicians' illusion. A horrendous--but not buried--explosion of family hatred. These are the nerve centres of Ross Macdonald's new Lew Archer novel, the richest we have had from the author of 'the best detective novels ever written by an American' (New York Times)--a fusion of unfaltering suspense with dramatic revelation of the way lives are shaped and misshaped in the flow of time, in the hidden and dangerous emotional currents beneath the surface of family history. The time is now; the place, Southern California. The stolen canvas that Archer has been hired to retrieve is reputed to be the work of the celebrated Richard Chantry, who vanished in 1950 from his home in Santa Teresa. It is the portrait of an unknown woman--and on its trail Archer moves with edgy competence among the intrigues of dealers and collectors. Until suddenly he is drawn into a web of family complications and masked brutalities stretching back fifty years through a world where money talks or buys silence, where social prominence is a murderous weapon, where behind the plausible façades of homes not quite broken but badly bent, a heritage of lies and evasions pushes troubled men and woman deeper into trouble. And as he pursues the Chantry portrait--and the larger mystery of Richard Chantry--Archer himself is shaken as never before: Archer himself is shaken as never before: Archer, the solitary traveller, the loner who has through the years deliberately addressed himself to the deciphering of other people's lives, is thrust into an inescapable encounter with a woman who will complicate his own..."--Page [1].
