Lew Archer

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 of marijuana, $20,000 from a big-time bank heist by a small-time crook, corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters and abused wives, and a band of sinners on the loose in the hills-all make the little town of Las Cruces seem a lot more interesting than noted in the guide book. As the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in a mystery in which everyone is a suspect and everyone a victim.

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.

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.

Lew Archer knew he shouldn't have taken the case, but Alex Kincaid seemed so desperate. Kincaid's loving new bride Dolly had just inexplicably walked out on him, leaving Kincaid more than a little fearful for her sanity-and her safety. So Archer reluctantly agreed to help Kincaid find her. But what he found instead was enough to send a chill down anyone's spine-a new fresh corpse and evidence linking Dolly not only to this murder but to a series of others dating back to before she was even born. Winner of the Mystery Writer of America Grand Master Award, Ross Macdonald is acknowledged around the world as one of the greatest mystery writers of our time and is labeled as one of the founding authors of the hard-boiled detective-most notably for Lew Archer in the series of novels on his many detective cases.

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 that a handful of dreamers and losers came together in the Barcelona twenty years ago, but some questions still remain unanswered: 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?

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 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. If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is Ross Macdonald. Sleeping Beauty is crime fiction at its best.

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 setting, 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 an unknown woman. Suddenly, Archer finds himself drawn into a web of family complications and masked brutalities stretching back fifty years, through a world where money both talks or buys silence; where social prominence is a murderous weapon; where, behind the plausible façades of homes not quite broken but badly bent, a heritage of lies and evasions pushes troubled men and women deeper into trouble. And as he pursues the Chantry portrait and the larger mystery of Richard Chantry, Archer himself is shaken as never before-by a woman.