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Learn moreIn 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 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.
Ross Macdonald (1915–1983) was the pen name of Kenneth Millar. For over twenty years he lived in Santa Barbara and wrote mystery novels about the fascinating and changing society of his native state. He is widely credited with elevating the detective novel to the level of literature with his compactly written tales of murder and despair. His works have received awards from the Mystery Writers of America and of Great Britain, and his book The Moving Target was made into the movie Harper in 1966. In 1982 he was awarded the Eye Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Private Eye Writers of America.
Grover Gardner is an award-winning narrator with over a thousand titles to his credit. Named one of the “Best Voices of the Century” and a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine, he has won three prestigious Audie Awards, was chosen Narrator of the Year for 2005 by Publishers Weekly, and has earned more than thirty Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, [is] brought to its zenith by Macdonald.”
“[Grover Gardner] shows his talent as he captures the emotions of Archer, as well as the secondary characters, while maintaining the tempo of the story. [Gardner’s] tenor voice adapts well for the voices of the female characters in the novel.”
“Archer solves crimes with the instincts of a psychologist and the conscience of a priest, and the mid-twentieth-century Southern California setting is a wonderful ride in the Wayback Machine.”
“Everybody, particularly Lew, keeps feeling certain things in his bones…and all of this business entails illegitimacy, impostures, frauds, false identities, cover-ups, paraplotted with Macdonald’s literally stunning complexity so that you’re with him.”
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