Ross MacDonald
1) 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
...3) Prop man: from John Wick to Silver linings playbook, from Boardwalk empire to Parks and recreation
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
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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
...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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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
...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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