THE BLUE HAMMER

Lew Archer is hired to find a picture by a second-rate artist who disappeared some 25 years ago. Had he really painted it? Everybody, particularly Lew, keeps feeling certain things in his bones while still older ones surface and two men (art dealers) die now by the same m.o. used in an unresolved murder years before and all of this business entails illegitimacy, impostures, frauds, false identities, cover-ups paraplotted with Macdonald's literally stunning complexity so that you're with him even when you're really not. Any admirer of Macdonald's, and they are legion, should be able to follow that sentence from subject to predicate.