'I can't make your girl come back if she doesn't want to. I told you that on the phone...' When Lew Archer is hired to find out the truth about a suspiciously suave Frenchman who has run off with his client's girlfriend, it looks like a simple enough case. But things start to look very different when Archer connects the elusive foreigner with a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts. BLACK MONEY is Ross Macdonald at his very finest, revealing the skull beneath the sun-kissed skin of Southern California.

The three novels collected in this second volume in the Library of America Ross Macdonald edition represent for many readers the summit of American crime writing. They remain thrilling for their searing psychological truth-telling, daring flights of narrative invention, and their keenly observed picture of the manners and morals of a particular time and place (Southern California in the early 1960s). Each reflects Macdonald's enduring concern with the hidden crimes and agonizing dysfunctions that haunt families from one generation to the next. In The Zebra-Striped Hearse, a father's...