New Releases by Ross Macdonald

Lew Archer est engagé par Larry et Irene Chalmers, un couple de riches Californiens, pour déterminer si Nick, leur fils « à problèmes », est impliqué dans le cambriolage qu’ils viennent de subir. Mais l’histoire dépasse le simple fait divers lorsqu’un autre enquêteur, lié à Nick, est assassiné. Pour aider le jeune homme, Lew Archer remonte jusqu’à des événements beaucoup plus anciens, d’une portée autrement plus grande. Le détective plonge alors dans une histoire familiale aussi complexe que bien dissimulée. Nouvelle traduction d’Un regard d’adieu

A special edition of The Chill by Ross Macdonald. Featuring an introduction by James Ellroy. In The Chill a distraught young man hires private investigator Lew Archer to track down his runaway bride. But no sooner has he found Dolly Kincaid than Archer finds himself entangled in two murders, one twenty years old, the other so recent that the blood is still wet. What ensues is a detective novel of nerve-racking suspense, desperately believable characters, and one of the most intricate plots ever spun by an American crime writer. A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Special Edition

La meilleure série d''histoires de détective privé jamais écrite par un Américain. Lew Archer, détective privé spécialisé dans les affaires familiales délicates, n''est pas emballé par la mission que veut lui confier un certain Alex Kincaid : retrouver son épouse Dolly, une très belle jeune femme qui s''est volatilisée juste après leur mariage. Affolé, Kincaid n''a rien pu obtenir de la police : il ne croit pas à la simple fugue et redoute le pire, d''autant qu''un mystérieux barbu semble avoir joué un rôle dans cette disparition. C''est alors qu''Archer découvre certains indices qui semblent relier Dolly à d''anciens meurtres. Le détective s''enfonce peu à peu dans un labyrinthe d''intrigues qui soudent un clan redoutable.

Kolejna książka z serii Rossa Macdonalda, uchodzącej za swoistą klasykę amerykańskiego kryminału. Główny bohater, detektyw Lew Archer, prowadzi skomplikowane śledztwa, rozwiązując kolejne makabryczne intrygi i wdając się przy tym w niejedną niebezpieczną potyczkę z przestępcami. Dla Archera to kolejne mało emocjonujące zlecenie – musi odnaleźć obraz skradziony z domu Biemeyerów. Tego typu zdarzenia to nic szczególnego, zwłaszcza wśród nowobogackich rodzin z Kalifornii. Sprawa przybiera zupełnie inny obrót, gdy okazuje się, że zniknął także autor drogocennego dzieła. Ross Macdonald, właśc. Kenneth Millar, to amerykański pisarz, autor powieści kryminalnych. Najważniejszą w jego dorobku jest seria o detektywie Archerze. Pisarz debiutował w 1949 roku, od razu zyskując sobie czytelnicze zainteresowanie. Jest autorem nie tylko powieści, ale także zbiorów opowiadań. Wiele jego książek jak „Ruchomy cel" czy „Człowiek pogrzebany" doczekało się ekranizacji.

On the home front, two wartime lovers reunite under a cloud of paranoia in this thriller from Mystery Writers of America Grand Master 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 Führer 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.

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.

Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of his 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 has been investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to shore up their rancid wealth. However, after years of dastardly double-crossing and low down dirty-dealing, the family seem to be on the receiving end of a karmic death-blow. With two dead already and another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret before another Hallman lands on the slab.Murder, madness and greed grace The Doomsters, where a tony façade masks the rot and corruption within.

Lew Archer returns in this gripping mystery, widely recognized as one of acclaimed mystery writer Ross Macdonald''s very best, about the search for the long lost heir of the wealthy Galton family. 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. Devious and poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Strictly speaking, Lew Archer is only supposed to dig up the dirt on a rich man''s suspicious soon-to-be son-in-law. But in no time at all Archer is following a trail of corpses from the citrus belt to Mazatlan. And then there is the zebra-striped hearse and its crew of beautiful, sunburned surfers, whose path seems to keep crossing the son-in-law''s—and Archer''s—in a powerful, fast-paced novel of murder on the California coast.

Generations of murder, greed and deception come home to roost in time for the most shocking conclusion ever in a Lew Archer novel. 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 cool 100 Gs for his 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?

In The Far Side of the Dollar, private investigator Lew Archer is looking for an unstable rich kid who has run away from an exclusive reform school—and into the arms of kidnappers. Why are his desperate parents so loath to give Archer the information he needs to find him? And why do all trails lead to a derelict Hollywood hotel where starlets and sailors once rubbed elbows with two-bit grifters—and where the present clientele includes a brand-new corpse? The result is Ross Macdonald at his most exciting, delivering 1,000-volt shocks to the nervous system while uncovering the venality and depravity at the heart of the case.

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.

Las Cruces wasn’t a place most travelers would think to stop. But after private investigator Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, 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 guide book ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone’s a victim.

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. If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammet 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.

In The Goodbye Look, Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary at the mission-style 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 pre-decessors 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.

Un hombre solo quizás no pueda frenar la maldad, pero sí puede investigarla. Lew Archer es ese hombre dispuesto a descubrir la maldad que se camufla en la vida cotidiana. Un viejo conocido, abogado, reclama a Archer para que investigue la desaparición de un magnate del petróleo, que pronto emerge como un secuestro a cambio de cien mil dólares. Es lo que, en cierto modo, esperaba Archer en una América poseída por la codicia y por la violencia, un tiempo en el que miles de hombres han vuelto de la II Guerra Mundial y aún no han logrado ni olvidar ni encontrar su lugar en el mundo. Las vidas habían perdido valor y el dinero reemplazaba cualquier creencia. Pero, como sabe Archer, a veces hay que mirar más cerca para darse cuenta de que la ambición no conoce ni a padres ni esposos. La primera novela de Lew Archer, publicada en 1949, dibuja ya a ese detective emblemático, duro y profundo que ha cautivado a millones de lectores en todo el mundo.

Traveling from sleazy motels to stately seaside manors, The Ivory Grin is one of Lew Archer''s most violent and macabre cases ever. 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, run-down 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 number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who’s gone mysteriously missing.

In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence 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 Francisco 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.Filled with dope, delinquents and murder, this is classic Macdonald and one of his very best in the Lew Archer series.

Superhero Jack finds his life turned upside down by the arrival of a very big, and very naughty, baby sister.

What started out as another perfect day for a superhero performing heroic feats suddenly goes awry.

Jusqu''alors, Lucy était une jeune Noire rieuse, avec de grands yeux bruns et une bouche aux lèvres fines. Jolie et bien faite. A présent, ce n''est plus qu''un cadavre gisant dans une mare de sang, la gorge tranchée d''une oreille à l''autre. Vilaine affaire pour l''hôtelier, lequel aurait préféré qu''elle aille se faire égorger ailleurs ! Vilaine affaire pour Lew Archer qui était chargé de la surveiller : pas la peine d''être le meilleur détective privé du secteur si à la première occasion votre gagne-pain vous claque entre les doigts ! Seul indice : une coupure de journal retrouvée dans les affaires de Lucy et qui relate la disparition inexpliquée d''un homme jeune, beau et riche ! Gibier de choix qui, semble-t-il, ne laissait personne indifférent. Comme dans les autres volumes de la série Lew Archer, Ross MacDonald se fait ici le " psychanalyste " pertinent d''une Californie noire et jaune aux sombres intrigues.

When Lew 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. Black Money is Ross Macdonald at his finest, baring the skull beneath the untanned skin of Southern California''s high society.

Lew Archer, the hard-nosed detective with a heart of gold, threads his way through a host of mysteries peopled with a slew of nefarious characters

Kriminalroman.