In the third Aloysius Archer mystery (after A Gambling Man, 2021), it's the early 1950s. A movie writer thinks someone is planning to kill her, and she wants to hire Archer, a private eye, to protect her. But before Archer can even come up with a game plan, his prospective client vanishes. Has she been murdered? Someone close to the missing woman hires Aloysius to find out. But what seems like a relatively straightforward missing-person case soon gets considerably more complicated, not to mention deadly. Baldacci's bibliography is sort of a mixed bag, with some really good books and some that read like imitations of other people's hits. With the Aloysius Archer books, though, he's found himself a winning series. Archer is a WWII veteran who spent time behind bars for a crime he didn't commit; he's a guy trying to get by in a hard world. The author mostly writes stories set in the present day, but in the Archer series, he proves a natural at handling the postwar setting. Baldacci's fans should be lining up for this one.

Bestseller Baldacci's welcome third outing for PI Aloysius Archer (after 2021's A Gambling Man) takes Archer, a decorated WWII vet who works for a detective agency in Bay Town, Calif., to Los Angeles to celebrate New Year's Eve 1952 with actress and love interest Liberty Callahan. That evening, at a restaurant frequented by such stars as Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx, Callahan introduces Archer to her friend Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter working on a script for Bette Davis. After Lamb learns of Archer's profession, she seeks to hire him because she's gotten middle-of-the-night--hang-up calls, and someone entered her Malibu home and left a bloody knife in her kitchen sink. Lamb's fears for her life seem justified when she disappears. Right after Archer finds an unknown man shot to death in her house, someone bludgeons the gumshoe into unconsciousness. The tension rises as his subsequent investigation places his own life in danger. Baldacci can be a bit overfond of similes and metaphors (ocean breakers hurl "their sound tentacles"), but otherwise solid prose nicely evokes the traditional hard-boiled whodunit. Raymond Chandler fans will be entertained. Agent: Aaron Priest, Aaron M. Priest Literary. (Apr.)