History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10

• Plot: A father searching for his own missing father is murdered, his young son is taken, and a wildfire races toward the California coast.
• Clues: Carefully laid across a twenty-year-old disappearance and a tangle of families.
• Reveal: Characteristically layered, turning on who belongs to whom.

Lew Archer meets a small boy, Ronny, and his mother at their house in Santa Teresa, California. The boy’s father, Stanley Broadhurst, has been obsessed with finding his own father, who abandoned the family years earlier. Stanley takes Ronny off with a young woman, and soon afterwards Stanley is found dead in the path of a forest fire.

Macdonald’s great theme, the damage that passes between generations, gets one of its most elegant treatments here. The search for the boy uncovers a buried crime from the past, and the families of the hills turn out to be linked in ways they themselves don’t fully understand.

The forest fire is the novel’s master image. It advances through the book, forcing evacuations and covering the landscape in smoke and ash. Macdonald wrote with an early environmental consciousness, and the fire, like the oil spill in his previous book, becomes a symbol of what is being done to California.

The novel brought him mainstream literary attention. Eudora Welty reviewed it on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and his sales rose accordingly.

The drawback is familiarity. By this point, readers of the series will anticipate the shape of the revelations, and the coincidences required to make everything fit are steep. Some find the symbolism heavy.

The 8 reflects a mature, moving and beautifully written Archer novel. It lacks the shocking precision of The Chill, but its atmosphere and compassion are among Macdonald’s best.