The Drowning Pool

In The Goodbye Look Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary at the missionstyle mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect their son Nick has a talent for disappearing and the Chalmerses 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 a mysterious hobo. Then a stiff turns up in a car on an empty beach. And Nick 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. If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler it is 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.