Rating: 9/10
- Plot: A bride walks out on her husband the day after the wedding, and the search reopens two murders separated by twenty years.
- Clues: Scrupulously planted across decades, and almost all of them hinge on who someone really is.
- Reveal: One of the most famous final twists in American crime fiction, delivered in the last lines.
Alex Kincaid’s wife, Dolly, disappears the morning after their wedding. He hires Lew Archer to find her. Archer does so quickly, working at a college in a California coastal town, but finding her is only the start. Dolly was a witness, as a child, to her mother’s murder, and a woman who has just been killed may be connected.
The Chill is Macdonald at the height of his powers. His great theme, the way the sins of one generation poison the next, is here pursued with an almost architectural precision. Every relationship turns out to have a hidden side. The college dean, his domineering mother, a murdered teacher and a family history in the Midwest all fit together into a pattern that becomes visible only at the end.
Archer’s role is mostly to listen. He moves from interview to interview, patiently, feeling for the people involved. His compassion for Dolly, a damaged young woman trying to understand what she saw, gives the book its emotional centre.
The prose is lean and melancholic, with images of fog, surf and lonely suburban houses that suit a story about concealment.
The plot is intricate enough that some readers need a diagram, and the coincidences required to make it work are considerable. That is the only thing standing between this book and a perfect score.
The 9 reflects perhaps the best-constructed Lew Archer novel. The final revelation is so well prepared that it seems, on reflection, inevitable, which is what the best mysteries achieve.
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