'The new crime and espionage series from Penguin Classics makes for a mouth-watering prospect' Daily Telegraph Maude Slocum is in trouble. But luckily trouble is Investigator Lew Archer's business. A well-dressed, wealthy woman has arrived at Archer's L.A. office, having intercepted a poison pen letter accusing her of adultery. Reluctantly agreeing to help her find the culprit, he dives into the Slocums' moneyed, oil-rich California world. But when Maude's mother-in-law is found dead in the swimming pool, secrets come to the surface too. For the urbane, world-weary Archer, a case of blackmail soon becomes murder.

Intended for the general student of the Indonesian language and the professional linguist, this short descriptive grammar is a useful guide as a well as a point of departure for more intensive study.

Bruce Carscadden Architect is a design studio based in Vancouver. In a decade of practice, their studio has designed and executed numerous building types for a variety of clients, with an emphasis on community recreation projects in British Columbia. Carscadden Thrift is structured in the spirit of the translation from drawing (speculation) to material (actual). Photographs document the messy realities of construction and are referenced to select drawings. The analogy to a set of contract documents is obvious but not superficial. It requires readers to examine both in order to understand the nature of a project, projects that taken collectively describe the culture of the studio and the firm's attempts to understand questions posited by the constraints of scale, site and schedule.

This book explores the varied and unusual prop work of movie and TV graphic prop designer Ross MacDonald. MacDonald's prop work for film and TV is explored through an interview by Steven Heller, a photographic essay on his work on National Treasure, and a collection of his work (building and designing the physical pieces as well as the graphic ones) divided into categories including books, cards and letters, and documents, such as maps and legal papers. This book includes many of his most popular props for movies and shows such as Silver Linings Playbook, National Treasure, Baby's Day Out, Boardwalk, The Knick, Parks and Rec, and many, many more.

He was a son who hadn't known his father very well. It was a town shaken by a grisly murder--his father's murder. Johnny Weatherly was home from a war and wandering. When he found out that his father had been assassinated on a street corner and that his father's seductive young wife had inherited a fortune, he started knocking on doors. The doors came open, and Johnny stepped into a world of gamblers, whores, drug-dealers, and blackmailers, a place in which his father had once moved freely. Now Johnny Weatherly was going to solve this murder--by pitting his rage, his courage, and his lost illusions against the brutal underworld that has overtaken his hometown.

In the colorful and letter-filled Capital City, there's never a moment's rest for Private I, the city's best investigator. Trouble seems to always have a way of finding him-trouble with a capital T. On this particular day, T tells Private I that his watch is missing. And T isn't alone-the citizens of Capital City have lost track of timepieces all over town! Can Private I catch the perp and make up for lost time before it's too late?

Lew Archer, world-weary private investigator, is hired by Larry and Irene Chalmers when they suspect that their troubled son Nick is involved in their own burglary. But when a fellow investigator - one who's been working with Nick - turns up dead, Archer soon realizes this isn't simply about some stolen loot. To help their son, Archer must uncover the truth about a kidnap years ago, and discover why the handgun from a decades-old killing apparently turns up at every new and terrible murder. In The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald exposes the damage families can cause one another in the name of love, lies and greed. Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

From his vantage point in Southern California--and through the eyes of his great creation, private eye Lew Archer--Ross Macdonald (the pseudonymn of Kenneth Millar) fashions a haunting, startlingly immediate vision of modern America: a swirling mix of sexual exploitation, intergenerational conflict, racial animosities, and ecological disaster. In Black Money, Archer is hired to find a wealthy man gone missing and soon finds himself investigating a suspicious seven-year-old suicide. The case becomes a peeling away of many levels of deception, delusion, and false identity. Exploring themes of immigration and border-crossing central to Macdonald's own life, Black Money also pays homage to The Great Gatsby, one of his favorite books. The Instant Enemy begins with Archer's search for a runaway teenage daughter and her troubled, possibly murderous boyfriend, a search that uncovers a morass of hidden wrongs. In an emotionally intense work that reflects the chaos and conflicts of his family's troubled past, Macdonald gives indelible and ultimately tragic expression to the generational conflict and drug culture of the DJHCs. An investigation into "a rather peculiar burglary" takes a drastic turn with the discovery of a body in an abandoned car on a beach in The Goodbye Look, the book that sealed Macdonald's reputation as the preeminent crime novelist of his time. Tracking a stolen heirloom, Archer follows a trail of violence that lays bare a miasma of buried secrets and unforgotten traumas. "In our day," wrote Eudora Welty, "it is for such a novel as The Underground Man that the detective form exists." A raging wildfire stirred by the Santa Ana winds serves as prelude to a chain of kidnapping and murder. Youthful rebellion is pitted against the hypocrisies of the older generation in a novel, in Welty's estimation, "not only exhilaratingly well done; it is also very moving."

Twenty years ago, Anthony Galton vanished, along with his streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of the Galton fortune. Now his dying mother wants him found, and Lew Archer is on the case: is Anthony hiding somewhere, happy and eager not to be discovered? But what Archer finds - a headless skeleton, a clever con and a terrified blonde - reveals a game whose stakes are so high that someone is willing to kill. The Galton Case is a wonderfully devious and poetic look at poverty, greed, murder and identity. Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

'I can't make your girl come back if she doesn't want to. I told you that on the phone' But something changes... 'The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American' William Goldman 'A beautiful job, rich in plot and character...surprising and shocking' NEW YORK TIMES 'I love the Lew Archer books' James Ellroy When Lew Archer is hired to find out the truth about a suspiciously suave Frenchman who has run off with his client's girlfriend, it looks like a simple enough case. But things start to look very different when Archer connects the elusive foreigner with a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts. BLACK MONEY is Ross Macdonald at his very finest, revealing the skull beneath the sun-kissed skin of Southern California.

Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly--or for someone to make her disappear. Before he can find the Wycherly girl, Archer has to deal with the Wycherly woman, Phoebe's mother, an eerily unmaternal blonde who keeps too many residences, has too many secrets, and leaves too many corpses in her wake.

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 bizarrekidnapping. 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 andtragic 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 Hammetand 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 hintedat. 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 humansin.

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

Private detective Lew Archer has better things to do than take on an investigation for Alex Kincaid, a young man claiming that his new bride, Dolly, has gone missing. Snapped by a hotel photographer on the day of their wedding, the beautiful girl vanished only hours after and Alex has heard nothing since. But when Archer begins digging, he finds evidence that links Dolly to brutal murders that span two decades, and a terrible secret. In this byzantine and compelling tale, Ross Macdonald explores the darkest experiences that can bind a family together - and tear it apart. Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

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?

A raw, gripping debut novel about overcoming the fear of the world. When Orville James McFadden witnesses the murder of his grandmother and sister, he unwittingly starts down a haunting path of fear, one that inevitably leads him to attempt to end it all by jumping off the Ballard Bridge-but he finds himself alive, handcuffed and in a hospital, wherein he must learn to choose to live-upon his release, Orville is driven to take bold action and moves to Vietnam for the greatest adventure of his life, but he soon discovers that a life worth living comes with a heavy price.

The desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness and only Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art. Finding a purloined portrait of a leggy blonde was supposed to be an easy paycheck for Detective Lew Archer, but that was before the bodies began piling up. Suddenly, Archer find himself smack in the middle of a decades-long mystery of a brilliant artist who walked into the desert and simply disappeared. He left behind a bevy of muses, molls, dolls, and dames-each one scrambling for what they thought was rightfully theirs.

When Maude Slocum - beautiful, frightened and angry - comes to Lew Archer's office with a poison pen letter intended for her husband, he reluctantly agrees to help her. As he follows the Slocums around, Archer finds that Mrs Slocum might have the least of the family's troubles: her teenage daughter is desolate, her husband is in the closet and her mother-in-law has just come to an unpleasant end in the swimming pool. But why is their handsome ex-chauffeur still hanging around? And what does the sinister Pacific Refinery Company have to do with the all the bloodshed? The Drowning Pool is Ross Macdonald's gripping tale of adultery, jealousy, murder and lies. Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

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 facade masks the rot and corruption within.