Noah Goats's Reviews > The Zebra-Striped Hearse

I'm having fun re-reading my old Ross Macdonald paperbacks. This one is a particularly tangled web involving, as so many Macdonald novels do, conflict between parents and children. The older generation is always messing up the younger generation in these novels and this turns most of the Lew Archer novels into a combination of mystery and family drama. (The downside is that it sometimes makes Macdonald go into eyeroll inducing Freudian explanations of his character's behavior.) In reading this novel I realized that each of Archer's interviews with suspects and witnesses could almost stand as a short story by itself, they are all little pockets of drama. Macdonald is a skilled storyteller and an excellent weaver of mysteries. Very entertaining.