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. In The Drowning Pool, 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.

As a mysterious fire rages throughthe hills above a privileged town inSouthern California, 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.
If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler,...

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 untanned skin of Southern California's high society.

In The Far Side of the Dollar, private investigator Lew Archer is looking for an unstable rich kid who has run away from an exclusive reform school and into the arms of kidnappers. Why are his desperate parents so loath to give Archer the information he needs to find him? And why do all trails lead to a derelict Hollywood hotel where starlets and sailors once rubbed elbows with two-bit grifters and where the present clientele includes a brand-new corpse? The result is Ross Macdonald at his most exciting, delivering 1,000-volt shocks to the nervous system while uncovering the venality...