The Wycherly Woman (Lew Archer Series #9) Book

A rich guy's daughter went missing for some time - she practically disappeared from the face of the Earth. After two months her father realized something is off and hired Lew Archer to find her. One of his main conditions for the search: Archer should not try to get in touch with his ex-wife and girl's mother. This precaution seems to be fairly prophetic as the moment Archer tried to do so he began finding dead bodies.

For me this was the book which finally made me say that Ross Macdonald is the grand-master when it comes to this particular trope:

According to one of my friends who read his biography, Macdonald grew up in not what one would call a perfect family exactly, so he knew first-hand some of the things he wrote about. His experience helped him create believable dysfunctional families with a lot of rot and corruption underneath the glamour cover and plenty of said skeletons in the proverbial closets.

This is a good page-turner with complicated plot, but if I want to do a minor nitpicking I would mention some very occasional slowdowns of the plot. My final rating is 4 very solid stars.