Of course I'm doing this all wrong. This is series fiction and I should read it in order. This is the eighth Lew Archer novel and the only one I ever read before was the second. So that's kind of a disaster.

But for the first time in my life I had not brought too many books on a trip. I actually had nothing to read. In addition to the two previously mentioned rejects, I had bought The Thursday Murder Club in the Amsterdam airport, read half of it and left it in a hotel in Malmö.

So The Galton Case it was, and now I think I might have to read this entire series.

Lew Archer doesn't talk about himself much and neither does MacDonald waste a lot of time trying to get us to worship this guy. He's just someone who does his job and his big advantage is just being persistent.

He's not a superman. At one point he gets savagely beaten by gangsters and he's in the hospital for more than a week. It takes him a long time just to be able to stand up again. Usually in this kind of book, no one ever has a concussion and certainly our P.I. hero can bounce back from anything just by downing a "slug" of whiskey.

A lawyer Archer knows represents a wealthy woman who wants to find her estranged son. She's near the end of her life and she hasn't seen him in decades. She feels bad about the rift and would like to repair it. Also she has millions of dollars he can inherit.

As cases go, this is about as cold as it gets. But it heats up almost immediately with a stabbing murder, a stolen car, a shooting, Archer getting arrested as the prime suspect, etc.

Archer is doing pretty much all leg work here, driving and flying all around California and, eventually, to other parts of the country and also to Canada, simply asking questions and gathering information.

It's an almost constant stream of information and exposition but it's never boring. It zips right around and MacDonald never lets you see the mechanics of what he's doing.

What's really incredibly is how much the plot twists and turns. I lost count of how many times the reader is directed toward a perfectly reasonable conclusion that's supported by everything Archer has observed or discovered, only to find out that, well, no, that's not what happened.

But these aren't cheap red herrings. This is Archer doing his job and finding it to be hard work. And he's taking us along with him.

The writing is perfect, stylish and amusing and effective, economical and precise. The first line is "The law offices of Wellesley and Sable were over a savings bank on the main street of Santa Teresa".