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(0)Ross Macdonald
Sleeping Beauty plunges private detective Lew Archer into a fascinating and intricate case connected to a disastrous oil spill on the southern California coast. It leads Archer 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
...In this masterful Macdonald mystery, the desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness, and only Lew Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art.
The era is the 1970s, the settin, Southern California. Private investigator Lew Archer has been hired to retrieve a stolen canvas reputed to be the work of the celebrated Richard Chantry, who vanished in 1950 from his home in Santa Teresa. It is the portrait of
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A hitchhiker stumbles to his knees on the side of a dark road. Private detective Lew Archer stops his car. When he gets to the young man, Archer realizes that he has stumbled into a mess—for the hitchhiker is dying of a gunshot wound.
In a matter of hours, Archer is suspected by the law, hired by a target-shooting trucking magnate, and propositioned by an adulterer's wife. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full
...Like many Southern California millionaires, Ralph Sampson keeps odd company. There's the sun-worshipping holy man whom Sampson once gave his very own mountain; the fading actress with sidelines in astrology and S&M....
As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, private investigator 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
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Has Tom Hillman run away from his exclusive reform school, or has he been kidnapped? Are his wealthy parents protecting him or their own guilty secrets? And why does every clue lead Lew Archer to an abandoned Hollywood hotel, where starlets and sailors once rubbed shoulders with tycoons and hustlers? The once-popular palace is now boarded up, but for Archer, it may hold the key to a missing teenager and a hot murder.
Archer knows
...When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his wife, who stand to inherit, as well as a questionable chauffeur and a tycoon of a company trying to get the woman's property for the oil under it.
Private Investigator Lew Archer takes this case in the Los Angeles suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred—and sufficient
...8) Black money
When private investigator 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
...If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantel of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.
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...10) The Galton case
Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Lew 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
...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
...Ross Macdonald is one of the "Big Three" in American hard-boiled detective fiction, along with Chandler and Hammett. In The Barbarous Coast, tough, thoughtful private eye Lew Archer pursues a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living. Archer's investigation leads him to an ex-fighter with an unexplained movie contract, a big-time gambler who died by his own knife, and finally, to an answer he would rather not have known.
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