Reviewing this book exceedingly difficult. The plot is very complicated and stopping at a point where not too many reveals have been mentioned is nearly impossible. So I will err here on the side of telling too little rather than too much.
Archer is hired by the callow youth, Alex Kincaid, to find his new wife Dolly, who has suddenly disappeared. Archer takes the case when it is clear the police are uninterested and finds Dolly quickly, but of course complications arise.
A man from her past has shown up at their hotel. This and the death of her college advisor, Helen Haggerty, has sent her into flight. She claims, in fact, that she's caused Helen’s death. Archer puts Dolly into a rest home with a man who has treated her in the past for similar incidents. Kincaid hangs around to keep an eye on her.
It seems that Dolly is linked to a number of mysterious deaths over a long period. The dean of the college Dolly attends also figures into the story at multiple points. He is dominated by his mother although puts up less of a fuss than you might expect.
This
is very much a story about family relationships and how children can be
manipulated by adults. The past has the present in a stranglehold in
this book. Try as they might, the characters in THE CHILL are helpless
but to follow a path they sometimes had no hand in making. Although many
characters in THE CHILL only appear on the page for a minute or two,
they are each given the traits to be memorable. Archer himself is the
least memorable and I think Macdonald planned it thusly.
9 comments:
You're reminded me, Patti, of how long it's been since I read a MacDonald. I really ought to get back to his work, as I always liked his approach.
Archer was mainly a prism through which we got to see his world. He didn't need to be memorable; his world did.
Too long indeed. As I have moved so many times in the last decade I have discarded all his books and you don't see them at libraries or book sales so it takes some effort to read them now. When you pare from thousands to perhaps two hundred many are gone.
Good point, Jerry. Be interesting to test that theory by reading more.
Like you, I shed so many books during my two moves in the last ten years. I did hang on to these. I started rereading his last year. He was my go to for post Spade and Marlowe pi fiction.
I can still remember when John Leonard got the front page of the Book Review to review this one (I think), which made a big splash at the time. It's been decades since I read it, but it was definitely a favorite.
I wonder how much the Millars' terrible relation with their own kid helped inspire this novel, which I read a couple of decades ago, well before I knew anything about their personal lives. Interesting.
I've been trying to hold together my library through too many moves over the last thirty years, with mixed results. The current house, the abode I've lived in longer than any other, has (through collapsing ceiling in one room and flooded basement before sump pump repair and then replacement) destroyed more of them than any other.
FWIW dept.: Millar's affectation of the pseudonym was spelled by him as "Macdonald", lower-case ds only.
As outstanding as so many of his Archer novels were, THE CHILL is, to my mind, his masterwork. Its title is more than appropriate because climactic revelations might indeed induce a chill in some readers.
This is one I am looking forward to reading. I want to read more books by him in 2023.
It's been decades since I last read THE CHILL. I might make it an FFB in 2023.
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