Ross Macdonald

In the last days of World War II, a sailor discovers a transcontinental conspiracy. It is February 1945, and the war in the Pacific is nearing its climax. In Hawaii on his way to a new post, US Navy ensign Sam Drake stumbles across the girl of his dreams. Mary is a disc jockey, with a voice that's famous across the islands for playing late-night jazz that no young lover can resist. Before he can follow this modern siren home, they go to check on Mary's...

When Lew Archer stops for a hitchhiker and finds a young man dying of a gunshot wound, he knows he has stumbled into a mess. In a matter of hours he is suspected by the law, hired by a target-shooting trucking magnate, and chasing a hijacked load of hooch and a band of sinners on the loose.

The once popular Barcelona Hotel is now boarded up. Starlets and Navy boys once rubbed shoulders there with tycoons and hustlers. Lewis Archer knows that twenty years ago a handful of dreamers and losers came together in the Barcelona. The question now is what kind of deal went down there, and why were a mixed-up rich kid and a beautiful blonde the first to pay the price?

The facts pound hard and cold in Lew Archer's mind: a woman who means something to him is missing, a man has bled to death beneath a magnolia tree, and a killer is on the loose. The facts are falling into place, but he doesn't have to like them.

Sleeping Beauty plunges detective Lew Archer into a fascinating and intricate case connected to a disastrous oil spill on the Southern California coast. Ross Macdonald's masterful tale leads his investigator into a load of trouble involving ransom, a lethal dose of Nembutal, the death of a stranger found floating off shore, and three generations of the imposing Lennox family, whose offshore oil platform caused the spill. The young Lennox heiress—glimpsed...

A rabbit named Jack travels across the United States in a story based on the life of author Jack Kerouac.

From humble beginnings sketching Iowa's cornfields and rolling hills as a child, painter Grant Wood (1891-1942) became the father of Regionalism.

6 has a problem. Everyone knows that 7 is always after him. Word on the street is that 7 ate 9. If that's true, 6's days are numbered. Lucky for him, Private I is on the case. But the facts just don't add up. It's odd. Will Private I put two and two together and solve the problem . . . or is 6 next in line to be subtracted?