A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he's being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, run-down small town but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit from ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed numbers runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who's gone mysteriously missing.
'Macdonald's spare, controlled narration, built for action and speed, conveys the world through which the action moves and gives it meaning, [bringing] scene and character, however swiftly, before the eye without a blur.''Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review
In the character of Lew Archer, Ross Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin'and in so doing, gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. Deliciously devious and tersely poetic, The Galton Case displays Ross Macdonald at the pinnacle of his form.
Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's aging and very rich mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them.
'Exciting, beautifully plotted, and written with taste, perception, and compassion.''New York Times Book Review
Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly-or for someone to make her disappear. And before he could locate the Wycherly girl, Archer had to reckon with the Wycherly woman, Phoebe's mother, an eerily unmaternal blonde who kept too many residences, had too many secrets, and left too many corpses in her wake.
"Lew Archer [is] up to his neck in murder, kidnapping, and blackmail - just another day at the office. This is hard-boiled detective writing at the top of its form."-Library Journal
When Lew Archer is hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave Frenchman who's run off with his client's girlfriend, it looks like a simple case of alienated affections. Things look different when the mysterious foreigner turns out to be connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts.
Black Money is Ross Macdonald at his finest, baring the skull beneath the suntanned skin of Southern California's high society.
"The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American."-New York Times
Meet Me at the Morgue is the story of a kidnapping that led to four murders. In his search for the killer, Howard Cross digs deep into the Los Angeles underworld, finding along the way a beautiful, lost adolescent mourning a dead lover, a suitcase hidden under an aging sadist's bed, and a slovenly gentleman with an ice pick in his neck. Ross Macdonald has never written a story quite like this, and neither has anyone else.
Strictly speaking, Lew Archer is only supposed to dig up the dirt on a rich man's suspicious soon-to-be son-in-law. But in no time at all, Ross Macdonald's private eye is following a trail of corpses from the citrus belt to Mazatlan. And then there is the zebra-striped hearse and its crew of beautiful, sunburned surfers, whose path seems to keep crossing the son-in-law's-and Archer's-in this powerful, fast-paced novel of murder on the California coast.
"Macdonald is one of the elite in hard-boiled mystery fiction....Parker's rendition is a first-class reading."-AudioFile
When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. Private investigator Lew Archer takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred-and sufficient motive for a dozen murders.
"Tom Parker's narration perfectly captures Archer's world-weary persona and is by turns crisp, sardonic, and wry. He shows us the feeling behind Archer's mask of disengagement and capably handles the female characters with softer tones. The well-drawn characters involve the listener, and only references to prices and technology remind us that the story features a different time."-AudioFile
Like many Southern California millionaires, Ralph Sampson keeps odd company. There's the sun-worshiping holy man whom Sampson once gave his very own mountain, and the fading actress with sidelines in astrology and S&M. Now, one of Sampson's friends may have arranged his kidnapping.
As private eye Lew Archer follows the clues from the canyon sanctuaries of the megarich to jazz joints where you can get beaten up between sets, The Moving Target blends sex, greed, misdirected love, and family hatred into an explosive crime novel.
"Macdonald is one of a handful of writers in the genre whose worth and quality surpass the limitations of the form."-Los Angeles Times
As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, Lew Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or the victim of a bizarre kidnapping. What he uncovers amid the ashes is murder-and a trail of motives as combustible as gasoline. The Underground Man is a detective novel of merciless suspense and tragic depth, with an unfaltering insight into the moral ambiguities at the heart of California's version of the American dream.
"I should like to venture that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either...Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler."-New York Times Book Review
Sleeping Beauty plunges detective Lew Archer into a fascinating and intricate case connected to a disastrous oil spill on the Southern California coast. Ross Macdonald's masterful tale leads his investigator into a load of trouble involving ransom, a lethal dose of Nembutal, the death of a stranger found floating off shore, and three generations of the imposing Lennox family, whose offshore oil platform caused the spill.The young Lennox heiress-glimpsed for a haunting moment on the beach, clutching an oil-drenched sea bird in her arms-has disappeared, and while on her trail, Archer finds himself journeying into the hidden lives of a family twisted by money, power, and a compulsive instinct for infidelity.
"Not since the novels of Nathaniel West has the theme of American innocence grinding to a stop at the polluted waters of the Pacific so consistently reverberated through a body of writing."-Detroit News
Celebrated private eye Lew Archer is hired by a father intent on preventing the marriage of his daughter to a penniless and possibly murderous artist. The chase takes Archer from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and from the San Francisco Bay area to Los Angeles as more than one murder crowds the investigation.
The once popular Barcelona Hotel is now boarded up. Starlets and Navy boys once rubbed shoulders there with tycoons and hustlers. Lewis Archer knows that twenty years ago a handful of dreamers and losers came together in the Barcelona. The question now is what kind of deal went down there, and why were a mixed-up rich kid and a beautiful blonde the first to pay the price?
