The Underground Man (Lew Archer, #16)

The Underground Man is Ross Macdonald at his most brilliant and brilliantly exciting. It is his first new novel since the bets-selling and widely-acclaimed The Goodbye Look—and it may well be the finest novel in what The New York Times has called "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American."

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 life has been a kind of breakdown, a mother using her son as a scapegoat, a pair 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 mixes unfaltering suspense with that extraordinary perception of an American life-style (West Coast Affluent) that is the hallmark of Ross Macdonald.