In Ross Macdonald's novels, the past is always falling in on top of the present. Lew Archer, a wise, tired, divorced and lonely private eye, is hired to investigate a theft or a kidnapping or the disappearance of a child, and immediately, as if released by Archer's appearance on the scene, murky old cats begin to leap out of poorly sealed bags. Archer uncovers guilt wherever he goes, and his job, once the cats are all out and howling, is to put them together into a theory, to tie the past to the present, and to catch the whole case in what Macdonald calls, in an early novel, "the final amber." In Macdonald's new book, "The Blue Hammer," Archer tracks the past more obsessively than ever, and the result is the best work Macdonald has done in a number of years….

All detective fiction is fairly theological, given...