Though published in 1976, this doesn't feel like the type of crime/PI novel of the seventies. It's not remotely hard-boiled, for a start, though it's certainly noirish. If anything, MacDonald's Lew Archer novels are downright soft-boiled, there's always a terrible sadness at their core, and Archer is not immune to that sadness, in fact he seems drawn to it and braced for the inevitable pain he's determined to uncover.

In The Blue Hammer, Archer is asked to recover a stolen painting. Almost at once it becomes apparent that this isn't about an art heist but about deep dark family secrets, and Archer follows the clues and the threads, with a murder or two along the way, until the whole thing finally unravels.

This isn't exactly action-packed. Archer moves like a secular priests from person to person, extracting their confessions and putting the outlines of the larger story together from the details. There's lots of driving from one place to another, walks on beaches, long conversations and short ones. The urgency mounts when someone goes missing, though, and outcome depends on Archer working out who the hell is who.