The Wycherly woman | Collections | The Huntington

The Wycherly woman | Collections | The Huntington

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The goodbye look
Rare Books
"In this new novel, Macdonald's famous non-hero private eye Lew Archer ... picks his way through the overheated and explosive mazes of a wealthy family's long hidden secrets. A lost heirloom, a murder that breeds more murder, a boy's life poisoned by a money-crime committed before he was born--these are the elements of "The goodbye look." It is Ross Macdonald at his unnerving best: a novel at once brilliantly perceptive of the world it anatomises--the freeway culture of Southern California--and from first to last unfaltering in its dramatic excitement and suspense"--Page [1].
636043
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The blue hammer : a Lew Archer novel
Rare Books
"The theft of a valuable painting. The long-ago disappearance of a famous artist. A murder as deceptive as magicians' illusion. A horrendous--but not buried--explosion of family hatred. These are the nerve centres of Ross Macdonald's new Lew Archer novel, the richest we have had from the author of 'the best detective novels ever written by an American' (New York Times)--a fusion of unfaltering suspense with dramatic revelation of the way lives are shaped and misshaped in the flow of time, in the hidden and dangerous emotional currents beneath the surface of family history. The time is now; the place, Southern California. The stolen canvas that Archer has been hired to retrieve is 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--and on its trail Archer moves with edgy competence among the intrigues of dealers and collectors. Until suddenly he is drawn into a web of family complications and masked brutalities stretching back fifty years through a world where money 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 woman deeper into trouble. And as he pursues the Chantry portrait--and the larger mystery of Richard Chantry--Archer himself is shaken as never before: Archer himself is shaken as never before: Archer, the solitary traveller, the loner who has through the years deliberately addressed himself to the deciphering of other people's lives, is thrust into an inescapable encounter with a woman who will complicate his own..."--Page [1].
636046
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The underground man
Rare Books
"'The underground man' brings Macdonald's cool, pragmatic detective, Lew Archer, to a tragic fire that ravages a hillside community in Southern California. It enmeshes him in the lives of a group of troubled people searching for happy endings but fatally entangled in a web of murder and extortion stretching back through fifteen years--an angry father whose whole life has been a kind of breakdown, a mother using her son as a scapegoat, a part of alienated adolescents who believe they are rescuing a child from the adult world, and a sad woman living with a dreadful secret. The result is a novel that mingles unfaltering suspense with that extraordinary perception of an American life-style (West Coast Affluent) that is the hallmark of Ross Macdonald"--Page [1].
636044
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Sleeping beauty
Rare Books
"His new Lew Archer novel ... plunges Archer into a fascinating to intricate case connected to a disastrous oil spill on the coast of Southern California. It involves him with three generations of the imposing Lennox family whose offshore oil platform has caused the spill; whose young heiress, glimpsed for a haunting moment on the beach--handsome, angry-eyed, clutching an oil-drenched sea bird in her arms--has disappeared. On her trail, Archer finds himself journeying into a horrendous past, into the hidden lives of a family twisted by money, by power, by a ruthless, almost compulsive instinct for infidelity--infidelity between husbands and wives, parents and children, infidelity to friends, dependents, duty and, in a sense, to the earth itself. As Archer moves among these people, among their lies and contradictions; as episodes distant in time are linked--a derelict stranger found dead, a ship destroyed by fire in World War II, a secret case of extortion, a child's long-ago glimpse of violence; as the novel moves to its climactic and complex resolution, the reader is once more held fast by the unique art of Ross Macdonald: crackling suspense rooted in strong perception of reality"--Page [1].
636045
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The barbarous coast
Rare Books
"Though Lew Archer was called to the exclusive beach-side Channel Club in Malibu to save the club manager from a dangerously angry husband, he soon discovered that the club swimming pool was the depository for a lot of dirty linen. The angry young husband's wife, Hester, had recently been an exhibition diver at the pool; now she was missing. Two years before, her eighteen-year-old predecessor, Gabrielle, had been found dead early one morning on the adjoining beach. Looking for Hester, Lew Archer found the mystery of Gabrielle's death constantly obtruding. He also found himself up against a number of unpleasant characters who disliked his interest in both the missing girl and the dead one. Fast, tough and exciting, this story is John Ross Macdonald at this punch-packed best; if you read mysteries as a sedative, keep away from this one"--Dust jacket.
636033
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The instant enemy
Rare Books
"Davy's note to himself read: 1. Don't drive cars. 2. Don't drink alcoholic beverages. 3. Don't stay up too late--the night is the bad time. 4. Don't frequent crummy joints. 5. Don't make friends without careful investigation. 6. Don't use dirty language. 7. Don't use "ain't" and other vulgarisms. 8. Don't sit around and brood about the past. 9. Don't hit people. 10. Don't get mad and be an instant enemy. "You see what kind of boy he is?" Laurel said at my shoulder. "A real trier." So Davy tried, but his exertions did not result in tranquility and peaceful order. He was deeply compromised with the young girl, Sandy Sebastian, and with the circumstances that led up to her disappearance. Lew Archer, the famous detective of all Ross Macdonald's novels, was employed to find Sandy: a commission which led him to Davy, and to a family history loaded with crime and melodrama, starting far back in the past: a long violent chronicle of betrayals, deceptions and brutality which did not stop at murder"--Page [1].
636042