Find a Victim: A Lew Archer Novel

By Ross Macdonald

Las Cruces wasn’t a place most travelers would think to stop. But after private investigator Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder inquest. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of marijuana, $20,000 from a big-time bank heist by a small-time crook, corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters, and abused wives all make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guide book ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone’s a victim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307773333

Ross Macdonald

Ross MacDonald is an illustrator whose work has appeared in international publications. He lives in Connecticut.

Reviews for Find a Victim

[leslie398 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This entry in the Lew Archer series was a bit too hardboiled for my tastes. However, the ending was surprisingly heartrending so maybe it deserves another ½ star...

[jburlinson_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Archer gets him some.

[macdad-236140 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As a private detective Lew Archer is used to cases coming to him. But when he encounters a dying man on the side of the highway between Los Angeles and Sacramento, he quickly finds himself enmeshed in the investigation of a hijacked shipment of bourbon, the question of a missing woman, and the hostile relationship between a local businessman and the county sheriff. As corpses start to pile up, Archer must untangle the threads before more people die — with his own body possibly among them.

As the fifth book published in his Lew Archer series, Ross Macdonald's novel offers a nice mix of the fresh and the familiar. By this point he was increasingly focused on the elements that made his books so great, namely the characters revealed by his protagonist's investigations. Yet Macdonald starts the novel in a way unusual with his books, as he drops Archer into the middle of events, giving him a need to find a justification to stay with the case and see it through. The amount of effort this entails for his central character provided for a nice change of pace from his other works, and shows how willing Macdonald was to tweak with his formula to produce yet another engrossing tale of temptation and murder in postwar America.

[john.cooper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The fifth in the Lew Archer series is a classic whodunnit in which Archer, on the road between Los Angeles and Sacramento, stumbles into a fresh murder in the kind of small town where everyone knows everybody else, and no one tells all they know. Some readers may find the "solution" too easy to guess, but since I'm not a puzzle person, I had a grand time riding along on Archer's incomprehension and occasional misunderstandings. There is some ridiculous marijuana-related material—apparently MacDonald believed grass to be a fast-acting addictive narcotic barely distinguishable from opium. I also thought it funny that Archer happened to be carrying a case of 500 joints in the back seat of his car, supposedly to deliver to some sort of crime committee in the capital. Oh, that? Nothing in the box, officer! Aside from the reefer madness, there are the usual vivid characterizations, snappy dialogue, and wry narrative asides that keep me coming back to MacDonald. This is my favorite in the series so far, after The Way Some People Die (#3).

[matthew.ducmanas · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

So far not my favorite of Macdonald's hard-boiled fiction. It's his fifth featuring the detective character of Lew Archer and in some ways it feels less inspired than the previous four. Maybe Macdonald was starting to grow restless with the format. Still interested in reading more though, especially his late 50's output where he apparently perfects his craft.

[smichaelwilson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"I wished that I was made of steel and powered by electricity."Find a Victim, the fifth Lew Archer novel, starts off with Archer pulling over for what he at first thinks is a hitchhiker, but ends up being a mortally wounded man. Archer rushes him to the nearest town, where is awkward reception and the man's death inspire him to solve the murder of truck driver Tony Aquista.This opening underlines the appeal of Lew Archer and the direction that later novels would follow, as Archer is more of a sympathetic soul than some of your other hard-boiled gumshoes from the fifties. Archer is a veteran of both the streets and the war; he's familiar with death and deceit. What he isn't familiar with, however, is apathy. Archer wades through the same swamp of sex, drugs, corruption and degradation as an observer and occasional judge, but not with cynical detachment of his contemporaries.As he snoops around the city of Las Cruces (Also known as "The City of Crosses," or the multiple of Crux, both obvious allusions to the multiple betrayals and double-crosses occurring among our cast of characters), his compassion towards the frailties of human nature affect him and drive him to dig deeper more than any paycheck or thoughtless moral code. At one point he even seeks out employment to justify his involvement in the case, but even that is abandoned as he gets closer to the truth no one in interested in, and the justice nobody else appears to be looking for.Plot-wise, there isn't much groundbreaking material: Cheating husbands, frustrated wives, corrupt officials, duplicitous businessmen, violent criminals, cheap dives, loose women... You know the score. But MacDonald's prose will occasionally sweep in with something lyrical or unexpected, and Archer's tough exterior yields a soul of empathy and understanding just often enough to reveal his true search in Find a Victim isn't for justice, but humanity.

[phillipfrey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For me, the Ross MacDonald Lew Archer books are a real treat. I read this one a number of years ago and thought it time to read it again. Glad I did. Private investigator Archer drives toward a town he'll be passing through. He picks up an injured hitchhiker, which will pull him into a case of robbery, corruption, abused housewives, and murder. I have many more Lew Archer books and will be rereading them.