Ross Macdonald's penultimate Lew Archer novel begins with an oil spill off the California coast that sets off a complex mystery stretching back decades. There is a bit less of the snappy patter in Sleeping Beauty compared to earlier novels, and it is with some wistfulness that I am reading this series knowing that the last novel, The Blue Hammer, was touched by Macdonald's oncoming dementia. But in reading Macdonald and Simenon, "mere" genre novelists, it's clear that they know far more than most "serious" writers about human motivations and flaws.
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