The Chill (Macdonald novel)

Archer now sets out to look into the background of the killing and begins to suspect a link between that, the murder of Helen Haggerty and the shooting of property developer Luke Deloney in the Chicago suburb of Bridgeton twenty years before.

Archer returns from Bridgeton via Reno, where his contacts Arnie and Phyllis Walters help him locate Jud Foley, a suspect that he and Roy Bradshaw had seen in the grounds on the night of Helen's murder.

Knowing that Bradshaw is also staying in Reno, Archer visits his hotel room and discovers that he has secretly married his academic colleague Laura Sutherland and is living with her there.

To be able to marry, he had earlier passed a summer in Reno so as to establish residence according to Nevada law and get a divorce from a marriage he made while still a student at Bridgeton to Letitia Macready.

Back in Pacific Point, Dr Goodwin questions Dolly under pentothal and learns further details about the nights of Mrs McGee's and of Helen's murders.

Tom Nolan has even speculated in his biography of Macdonald that the portrayal of Roy Bradshaw's domestic situation was sarcastically based on Chandler's mother-fixation and late marriage to a woman twenty years his senior.

[9] Another theme of frustrated approximation, returned to several times in the novel, is Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, first introduced in a conversation between students as Archer begins his investigation in Bradshaw's college.