Proctosophy

I think that Ross MacDonald is my favorite mystery novelist, now that I've read The Galton Case. There's just something about his writing that pulls me along, so I don't want to put the book down, which is something I can't say about a lot of authors. An old, dying millionairess hires Lew Archer to locate her missing son, who walked out on the family nearly twenty years before for the love of a working-class woman. Archer, not really expecting to find much, comes up with a young man who may be the old matriarch's grandson, but whose mysterious past may show him to be an imposter if Archer can dig up the truth. If there's any fault in this book, it's the whole "family secrets" dynamic in general, which might be getting a bit stale for my taste, and it's why this book didn't get five stars. For the quality of writing, though, it certainly deserved five, and again, I couldn't put this book down.