The time is the 1970s; the place, Southern California. The stolen canvas that Lew archer has been hired to retrieve is reputed to be the work of the celebrated Richard chantry, who vanished in 1950 from his home in Santa Teresa. It is the portrait of an unknown woman-and on its trail Archer moves with edgy competence among the intrigues of dealers and collectors. Until suddenly he finds himself drawn into a web of family complications and masked brutalities stretching back fifty years through a world where money talks or buys silence, where social prominence is a murderous weapon, where, behind the plausible facades of homes not quite broken but badly bent, a heritage of lies and evasions pushes troubled men and women deeper into trouble. And as he pursues the Chantry portrait-and the larger mystery of Richard Chantry-Archer himself is shaken as never before: Archer the solitary traveler, the loner who has through the years deliberately addressed himself to the deciphering of other people's lives, is thrust into an inescapable encounter with a woman who will complicate his own...

From its almost hushed beginning to its violent climax and its unexpected-indeed astonishing-resolution, The Blue Hammer holds us riveted. This is Ross Macdonald at his incomparable best.

Ross Macdonald (1915-1983) was the pen name of Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco but raised in British Columbia, he returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. For over twenty years he lived in Santa Barbara and wrote mystery novels about the fascinating and changing society of his native state. His works have received awards from the Mystery Writers of America and of Great Britain, and his book The Moving Target was made into the movie Harper in 1966.