Black Money

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. But things look different when Martel 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.

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross MacDonald, Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, MacDonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.