In Sleeping Beauty, Lew Archer finds himself the confidant of awealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands--including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald's masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children. Riveting, gritty, tautly written, Slee...

Twenty years ago, Anthony Galton vanished, along with his streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of the Galton fortune. Now his dying mother wants him found, and Lew Archer is on the case: is Anthony hiding somewhere, happy and eager not to be discovered? But what Archer finds - a headless skeleton, a clever con and a terrified blonde - reveals a game whose stakes are so high that someone is willing to kill.The Galton Case is a wonderfully devious and poetic look at...

The desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness and only Detective Lew Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art.Finding a purloined portrait of a leggy blonde was supposed to be an easy paycheck for Archer, but that was before the bodies began piling up. Suddenly, Archer find himself smack in the middle of a decades-long mystery of a brilliant artist who walked into the desert and simply disappeared. He left behind a bevy of muses, molls, doll...

The beautiful, high-diving blonde had Hollywood dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy “uncle,” Lew Archer sniffs around Malibu and finds the stink of blackmail, blood-money, and murder on every pricey silk shirt. Beset by dirty cops, a bumptious boxer turned silver screen pretty boy and a Hollywood mogul with a dark past, Archer discovers the secret of a grisly murder that just won't stay hidden.Lew ...

Traveling from sleazy motels to stately seaside manors, The Ivory Grin is one of Lew Archer's most violent and macabre cases ever.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 fi...

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 high society.

It was a long way from the million-dollar Foothill Club to Pelly Street, where grudges were settled in blood and Spanish and a stolen diamond ring landed a girl in jail. Defense lawyer Bill Gunnarson was making the trip—fast. He already knew a kidnapping at the club was tied to the girl's hot rock, and he suspected that a missing Hollywood starlet was the key to a busy crime ring. But while Gunnarson made his way through a storm of deception, money, drugs, and passions, he couldn't guess h...

He was a son who hadn’t known his father very well. It was a town shaken by a grisly murder—his father’s murder. Johnny Weatherly was home from a war and wandering. When he found out that his father had been assassinated on a street corner and that his father’s seductive young wife had inherited a fortune, he started knocking on doors. The doors came open, and Johnny stepped into a world of gamblers, whores, drug-dealers, and blackmailers, a place in which his father had once moved freely....

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 Macdona...

Somebody in Pacific Point is guilty of a kidnapping, but what probation officer Howard Cross wants to find most is innocence: in an ex-war hero who has taken a tough manslaughter rap, in a wealthy woman with a heart full of secrets, and in a blue-eyed beauty who has lost her way. The trouble is that the abduction has already turned to murder, and the more Cross pries into the case the further he slips into a pool of violence and evil. Somewhere in the California desert the whole scheme may...

Silken skin pale against dark hair, red lips provocatively smiling at him—that’s how Lieutenant Bret Taylor remembered Lorraine. He was drunk when he married her, stone cold sober when he found her dead. Out on the sunlit streets of L.A. walked the man—her lover, her killer—who had been with her that fatal night. Taylor intended to find him. And when he did, the gun in his pocket would provide the quickest kind of justice. But first Taylor had to find something else: an elusive memory so p...

'I can't make your girl come back if she doesn't want to. I told you that on the phone' But something changes...'The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American' William Goldman'A beautiful job, rich in plot and character...surprising and shocking' NEW YORK TIMES'I love the Lew Archer books' James EllroyWhen Lew Archer is hired to find out the truth about a suspiciously suave Frenchman who ...