Some are married, some were formerly married, some are parents, some are their children, some are their employees, and some were students of a woman one who was a teacher, an unfaithful wife, and a gullible victim. For the most part the characters are neither memorable nor interesting, their motivations for their actions are not especially believable, and the complex relations among them are confusing. The story involves a long series of brief conversations with an ever-expanding cast of characters. He quickly locates the boy but is knocked unconscious, and when he awakes the boy is gone. Later that day Archer finds the father murdered. Shortly after the boy and his father leave the mother comes to Archer’s apartment and hires him to find and return the boy. Before long the boy’s father comes to take him on an outing, over the objection of his mother. Lew Archer steps out of his apartment one morning to toss peanuts to some scrub jays and a young boy of 5 or 6 soon comes out of a nearby apartment. The 16th novel in Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer series, The Underground Man is a slow moving, hard to follow PI noir from the early 1970s.
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