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