FREE THE INSTANT ENEMY PDF Ross Macdonald | 240 pages | 08 Apr 2008 | Random House USA Inc | 9780307279057 | English | New York, United States Book review: Ross Macdonald's *The Instant Enemy: A Lew Archer Novel* Look Inside. Generations of murder, greed and deception come home to roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew The Instant Enemy novel. Now, Archer is The Instant Enemy a cool Gs for his safe return by his coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? And is the daughter simply his nympho sex-kitten companion in crime or really a fragile kid, trying to block out horrific memories of bad acid and an unspeakable sex crime? Born near San Francisco in and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the US as a young man and published his first novel in He served as the president of the… More about Ross Macdonald. The best work Macdonald has done in years. When you buy a book, we donate a book. Sign in. Read An Excerpt. Apr 08, ISBN Add to Cart. Also available from:. Jan 12, ISBN Available from:. Paperback —. About The Instant Enemy Generations of murder, greed and deception come home The Instant Enemy roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel. Also in Lew Archer Series. Also by Ross Macdonald. See all books by Ross Macdonald. Product Details. Inspired The Instant Enemy Your Browsing History. The Goodbye Look. Ross Macdonald. The Underground Man. The Empty Trap. John D. Sleeping Beauty. Night Train. Judge Me Not. Blue City. The Language of Fear. The Cocktail Waitress. The Instant Enemy M. Richard Price. Murder in the Wind. The Blue Hammer. The Good Old Stuff. The Spenser Novels Robert B. The Shape of Snakes. Minette Walters. No More Dying Then. Ruth Rendell. The Comedy is Finished. Donald E. The The Instant Enemy of the Seven Gables. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Top of the Heap. Erle Stanley Gardner. Georges Simenon. Raymond Chandler. Mil Millington. Dick Tracy Forever. Michael Avon Oeming. Slam the Big Door. Walter Mosley. Some Lie and Some Die. Death in Venice and Other Stories. A Sleeping Life. Not in the Flesh. Related Articles. Looking for More Great Reads? Download Hi Res. LitFlash The eBooks you want at the lowest prices. Read it Forward Read it first. Pass it on! Stay in Touch Sign up. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later. Become a Member Start earning points for buying books! The Instant Enemy by Ross Macdonald The Instant Enemy by Ross Macdonald. Our Assessment: B : a bit off kilter, but a solid read. Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge and remind and warn you that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. The complete review 's Review :. The Sebastians' seventeen-year-old daughter, Sandy, has apparently run away -- and taken her father's shotgun with her. After being a good girl all her life she's been troubled for at least a few months now, and taken up with nineteen-year-old The Instant Enemy influence Davy. Archer takes the case -- noticing also The Instant Enemy tension between husband and wife, and how they're stretched thin, despite Sebastian's decent job: Their smart new house cantilevered over a steep drop The Instant Enemy an almost perfect image of their lives. Sandy's mother, Bernice, reads her daughters diary, and hints that there are clues to her changed behavior there -- but she won't share with Archer, not until very late in the day. When she does, the revelations are certainly shocking enough to explain a lot. Archer goes to Davy's home, but doesn't find him or the girl there. What he does find is a crudely drawn map, and the sawed-off barrels of a shotgun Talking to Davy's probation officer is hardly reassuring -- he tells Archer: "I'd say that the girl and Davy are spurring each other on to do something really wild". When Sebastian recognizes the map as one of his boss Stephen Hackett's place, Archer is understandably concerned. He goes to warn Hackett -- but it turns The Instant Enemy not to be enough: Hackett is kidnapped by Davy and the girl. Hackett's mother -- who is disturbingly close The Instant Enemy her son -- wants to hire Archer, too -- she doesn't trust the police, especially after they didn't solve the murder of her own husband, fifteen years earlier. There's a potentially huge payday there for Archer -- but the complications, and bodies, he finds make it an The Instant Enemy but open and shut case. Finding Sandy isn't that difficult; keeping her safe -- from herself, it turns out -- proves more of a challenge. And meanwhile Davy seems to have gone completely over The Instant Enemy edge. Two murders that happened only The Instant Enemy few days apart fifteen years earlier, and a mess of family entanglements keep Archer suspicious and busy: Cases break in different ways. This case was The Instant Enemy, not like a door or even a grave, certainly not like a rose or any flower, but opening like an old sad blonde with darkness at her core. Finally, the old family and police secrets bubble forth, and Archer puts it all together -- saying good-bye to his big payday, along the way. At least he manages to maybe set Sandy and her protective but misguided father on some course for a future, saving each of them from them their worst instincts as Sandy sure needs and deserves some professional help. Macdonald is pretty weak on some of the drug angle -- LSD and marijuana -- but seems to The Instant Enemy as much and doesn't make it figure too significantly. The perverse and complicated family relationships -- it's a wild set-up, behind it all -- can get a bit confusing, but at least pay off with a good final reveal. Still, this story is less about whodunnit The Instant Enemy, for that matter, what the hell was actually done I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I made all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive. Like the Bride of Frankenstein. The Instant Enemy isn't first-rate Macdonald, but it's still a pretty darn good read. Orthofer1 November Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs. The Instant Enemy Main. The Instant Enemy - US. The Instant Enemy - UK. The Instant Enemy - Canada. The Instant Enemy - India. La mineure en fugue - France. Durchgebrannt - Deutschland. Paura di vivere - Italia. The Instant Enemy - Ross Macdonald Macdonald based the setting on the house of a college-teacher friend, Richard Lid, and his wife Betty. The Lids had lived in Santa Barbara in the late s and been close to the Millars then. Linda was represented in The Instant Enemy by Sandy Sebastian, the vanished daughter whose The Instant Enemy against her parents and others are The Instant Enemy too vivid and whose previous behavior had seemed disturbing enough. The whole movement of the book is, in a remote but true sense, autobiographical. The fantasy broke in violence, as fantasies do, violence being the ultimate hideaway of unreality. Davy was my poor little tragic hero. The killing of the father, in both The Instant Enemy philosophic and narrative sense, is. These experiences probably had a great deal to do with the cinematic elements of my style. There is a scene in The Instant Enemyfor example, which could have been the climax of an episode in any cliff-hanger. And ina year before her own auto accident, Linda Millar wrote her father back east at the time about recent Santa Barbara The Instant Enemy crashes involving teenage drivers, the worst of which culminated with a boy she knew from school being decapitated by a moving train. The Ross Macdonald Collection 3-volume boxed set With its many shocking incidents and its multiply-entangled cast, and its tracing of the corrosive effects of so many vile deeds and strange secrets, Enemy had a great many plot lines to untangle at its denouement. Critic John M. Here Lew Archer encounters a broken-down old prospector and fisherman named Albert Blevins, who Macdonald said was an intended portrait of his own father, the ex-newspaper editor, ex-tugboat captain, and one-time silver-miner John Macdonald Millar:. I never should of married any woman. I felt a kind of short-circuit, a buzzing and burning, as if I had grounded the present in the actual flesh of the past. Once The Instant Enemy, Ross Macdonald had combined bits of his own history with imagination and sensibility, to contain and resolve past and present in a fictional catharsis both archetypal and unique. Library of America launches nationwide celebration of African American poetry with major online event and new website. Discount offer available for first-time customers only.