Search Results: Ross Macdonald from I Cannot Live Without Books

The Barbarous Coast (Lew Archer Series, Book #6) by Ross Macdonald
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 Archer navigates through the watery, violent world of wealth and privilege in this electrifying story of obsession gone mad.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1956, 2007

Black Money (Lew Archer Series, Book #13) by Ross Macdonald
When 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.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1965, 1966

Blue City by Ross Macdonald
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 Weather 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. Now Johnny Weather was going to solve this murder -- by pitting his rages, his courage, and his lost illusions against the brutal underworld that has overtaken his hometown.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1947, 2011

The Blue Hammer (Lew Archer Series, Book #18) by Ross Macdonald
The desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness, and only 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 Detective Lew Archer, but that was before the bodies began piling up. Suddenly, Archer finds himself smack in the middle of the decades-old mystery of a brilliant artist who walked into the desert and simply disappeared. He left behind a bevy of muses, molls, dolls, and dames -- each one scrambling for what they thought was rightfully theirs.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1976, 2008

The Dark Tunnel (Chet Gordon Series, Book #1) by Ross Macdonald
In 1937 Munich, an American, must be careful when he smokes his pipe. Robert Branch, a careless academic, makes the mistake of lighting up when the Fuhrer is about to begin a procession and nearly gets pummeled for his mistake. Only the timely intervention of Ruth Esch, a flame-haired actress, saves him. So begins a month-long romance between East and West -- a torrid affair that ends when the lovers make the mistake of defending a Jew, earning Branch a beating,= and Esch a trip to a concentration camp.
Six years later, Esch escapes to Vichy and makes her way to Detroit. To her surprise, Branch is waiting for her. He is a professor working for the war effort, and his paranoia about a spy inside the Motor City war board sours their reunion. Once again, a dangerous net is encircling these lovers -- a reminder that, in this war, love always comes second to death.
Open Road, Softcover, 1949, 2013

The Doomsters (Lew Archer Series, Book #7) by Ross MacDonald
Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of Hallman's parents, Senator Hallman and his wife, Alicia. Arriving in the sleepy town of Purissima, Archer discovers that orange groves may be where the Hallmans made their mint, but they've been investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to shore up their rancid riches. However, after years of dastardly double-crossing and low-down dirty dealing, the family seems to be on the receiving end of a karmic death blow. With two already dead and another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret before another Hallman lands on the slab.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1958, 2007

The Drowning Pool (Lew Archer Series, Book #2) by Ross Macdonald
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.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1950, 1996

The Ferguson Affair by Ross Macdonald
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 how some big shots and small-timers would all end up with murder in common.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1960, 2010

Find a Victim (Lew Archer Series, Book #5) by Ross Macdonald
Las Cruces wasn't a place most travelers would think to stop. But after Lew Archer plays the good Samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitch-hiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder inquest. 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 all make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guidebook ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in a mystery in which everyone is a suspect and everyone's a victim.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1954, 2001

The Galton Case (Lew Archer Series, Book #8) by Ross Macdonald
Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Deliciously devious, tersely poetic, The Galton Case displays Ross Macdonald at the pinnacle of his form.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1959, 1996

The Goodbye Look (Lew Archer Series, Book #15) by Ross Macdonald
In The Goodbye Look, Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary of the mission-style mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the Chalmers's are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, and a mysterious hobo. Then a stiff turns up with a Colt .45. In The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald delves into the world of the rich and the troubled and reveals that the past has a deadly way of catching up to the present.
Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, Softcover, 2000

The Instant Enemy (Lew Archer Series, Book # 14) by Ross Macdonald
At first glance, it's an open-and-shut missing persons case: a headstrong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie & Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett, a local millionaire industrialist. Now, Archer is offered a coll 100 Gs for Hackett's safe return by his coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? And is the daughter simply his nympho sex-kitten companion in crime or really a fragile kid, trying to block out horrific memories of bad acid and an unspeakable sex crime?
Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, Softcover, 1968, 2008

The Ivory Grin (Lew Archer Series, Book #4) by Ross Macdonald
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, rundown small town, but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit from ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed numbers-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who's mysteriously gone missing.
Traveling from sleazy motels to stately seaside manors, The Ivory Grin is one of Lew Archer's most violent and macabre cases ever.
Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, Softcover, 1952, 2007

Meet Me at the Morgue by Ross Macdonald
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 come down on the wrong man. Somewhere Cross is going to find the last piece of a bloody puzzle -- a mystery of blackmail, passion, and hidden identities that might be better left unsolved.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1954, 2010

Sleeping Beauty (Lew Archer Series, Book #17) by Ross Macdonald
In Sleeping Beauty, Lew Archer finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, 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, Sleeping Beauty is crime fiction at its best.
Vintage Crime / Black Lizard, Softcover, 1973, 2000

The Three Roads by Ross Macdonald
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 powerful it drove him down three terrifying roads toward self-destruction -- grief, ecstasy, and death.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1948, 2011

Trouble Follows Me (Chet Gordon Series, Book #2) by Ross Macdonald
It is February 1945, and the war in the Pacific is nearing its climax. In Hawaii on his way to a new post, U.S. Navy ensign Sam Drake stumbles across the girl of his dreams. Mary is a disc jockey, with a voice that's famous across the islands for playing late-night jazz that no young lover can resist. Before he can follow this modern siren home, they go to check on Mary's coworker sue -- but that lovely young lady will never spin another record.
They find her strung up and dangling outside the window of a bathroom, her face twisted into an ugly mask. The police call it suicide, but Sam is not so sure. Few beautiful women, even suicidal ones, are willing to be so hideous in death. Looking into Sue's past he finds another corpse -- and a dangerous conspiracy that stretches all the way back to his Motor City home.
Open Road/Mysterious Press, Softcover, 1946, 2013

The Underground Man (Lew Archer Series, Book #16) by Ross Macdonald
As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern 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.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1971, 1996

The Way Some People Die (Lew Archer Series, Book #3) by Ross Macdonald
In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrences presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as "crazy for men" and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Fransisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1951, 2007

The Wycherly Woman (Lew Archer Series, Book #9) by Ross Macdonald
Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly -- or for someone to make her disappear. And before he could locate the Wycherly girl, Archer had to reckon with the Wycherly woman, Phoebe's mother, an eerily unmaternal blonde who kept too many residences, had too many secrets, and left too many corpses in her wake.
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, Softcover, 1961, 1998