Ross Macdonald Four Later Novels Loa 295

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.” LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

In June 1973, Judge Robert Bork was plucked from a quiet life of academia at Yale University and planted in the tumultuous soil of constitutional crisis by a Nixon administration barreling toward collapse. From the ousting of Vice President Spiro Agnew to the discharge of the Watergate special prosecutor, an event known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Saving Justice offers a firsthand, insider account of the whirlwind of events that engulfed the administration during the last half of 1973 and the first few months of 1974. This important volume provides a revelatory look into the inner workings of the Justice Department during some of the most consequential months of the Nixon administration.

In this noir mystery, PI Lew Archer is hired to track down a missing child, but becomes embroiled in a baffling forest fire that threatens an affluent Southern California community.

In an autobiography that reads as compellingly as a novel by Andrew Greeley, Father "Bud" Kieser tells the true story of his engagement with the contemporary world and of his personal battle with the demons of pride, fear, and sesuality. 16 pages of black-and-white photographs.

He became famous with Genesis but simply to call Peter Gabriel a pop star would be to sell him very short indeed. Peter Gabriel has pursued several overlapping careers; neither becoming a parody of his past self nor self-consciously seeking new images, he instead took his creativeness and perfectionism into fresh fields. In 1975 he diversified into film soundtracks and audio-visual ventures, while engaging in tireless charity work and supporting major peace initiatives. He has also become world music’s most illustrious champion since launching WOMAD festival. These, and several other careers, make writing Peter Gabriel’s biography an unusually challenging task, but Daryl Easlea has undertaken countless hours of interviews with key friends, musicians, aides and confidants. Updated and revised for 2018, Without Frontiers gets to the heart of the psychological threads common to so many of Gabriel’s disparate endeavours and in the end a picture emerges: an extraordinary picture of an extraordinary man. Extra features include integrated Spotify playlists, charting the best of Genesis’ output with Peter Gabriel, as well as an interactive digital timeline of his life, filled with pictures and videos of lives performances, interviews and more. ‘The peculiar, white-lipped dynamic between Gabriel and his erstwhile Charterhouse chums in Genesis is vividly evoked’ – Record Collector ‘A truly wonderful biography of one of the most amazing artists of our time. Highly recommended.’ – Douglas Harr, author of ‘Rockin’ the City of Angels’

The year is 1920, and Bostonians from all walks of life- rich and poor, young and old, blue collar and white collar- are being enticed to invest their life savings with a friendly, charismatic Italian-American by the name of Charles Ponzi. Some are well meaning, while others are simply greedy. Little do they know that he is neither a financial wizard nor a boldly innovative thinker, but a grandiose fraudster and clever con artist who has kept under wraps a Canadian prison record for bank fraud- and who now seeks to make his obsessive dream of amassing great wealth come true at the huge expense of thousands of innocent people. Ponzi's incredible persuasive power to dupe foolish investors quickly extends beyond the city borders, and the overall fiscal health of the entire Commonwealth is soon under close scrutiny by Governor Calvin Coolidge, who entrusts Massachusetts Bank Commissioner Joseph C. Allen to investigate. When Allen seizes five banks and prevents Ponzi from accessing his stolen millions, the swindler's fate hangs in the balance. However, the full brunt of public wrath comes to bear on Allen and his wife, Hart-Lester Harris Allen- and even worse, their happy future together becomes highly questionable when a mob contract is put out on his life. As told through the eyes of Hart-Lester, Good Night, Dear Hart, Good Night opens with her idealistic, romantic adventures as a wealthy young college graduate; her marriage to Allen and their early trials and tribulations; and how Hart and Joe's paths unfortunately cross with the cunning Ponzi, whose own rise to power and rapid descent unfolds in alternating chapters. The book, written in narrative non-fiction style, is based on the author's interviews with Hart-Lester, other eyewitness accounts and associated correspondence, and newspaper and journal articles from this turbulent time in Boston's history. It offers a fascinating look at a bygone era as well as an examination of Ponzi, the smooth talking criminal and inventor of the first 'get-rich-quick' scheme that to this day continues to be reinvented (Bernard Madoff in 2009).

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.

Thirty-two of the most notable crime stories of the twentieth century come together in an entertaining anthology featuring contributions by Lawrence Block, James M. Cain, Fredric Brown, Chester Himes, John Jakes, Stuart M. Kaminsky, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Mickey Spillane, Bill Pronzini, and Donald E. Westlake, among others. Original.