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The Underground Man
The Lew Archer Series: Book #16
By Ross Macdonald
Narrated by Grover Gardner / 7 hours 33 minutes
As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, private investigator Lew Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or the victim of a bizarre kidnapping. What he uncovers amid the ashes is murder—and a trail of motives as combustible as gasoline.
The Underground Man is a detective novel of merciless suspense and tragic depth, with an unfaltering insight into the moral ambiguities at the heart of California’s version of the American dream.
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The Lew Archer Series Series
The Moving Target
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 6 hours 50 minutes
Abridged: No
Like many Southern California millionaires, Ralph Sampson keeps odd company. There’s the sun-worshiping holy man whom Sampson once gave his very own mountain, and the fading actress with sidelines in astrology and S&M. Now, one of Sampson’s friends may have arranged his kidnapping.
As private eye Lew Archer follows the clues from the canyon... Read More »
The Drowning Pool
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 6 hours 40 minutes
Abridged: No
When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his wife, who stand to inherit, as well as a questionable chauffeur and a tycoon of a company trying to get the woman’s property for the oil under it. Private Investigator Lew Archer takes this case in the Los Angeles... Read More »
The Ivory Grin
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 6 hours 33 minutes
Abridged: No
If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantel of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it was Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the... Read More »
Find a Victim
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 6 hours 6 minutes
Abridged: No
A hitchhiker stumbles to his knees on the side of a dark road. Private detective Lew Archer stops his car. When he gets to the young man, Archer realizes that he has stumbled into a mess—for the hitchhiker is dying of a gunshot wound.
In a matter of hours, Archer is suspected by the law, hired by a target-shooting trucking magnate, and... Read More »
The Barbarous Coast
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 7 hours 2 minutes
Abridged: No
Ross Macdonald is one of the "Big Three" in American hard-boiled detective fiction, along with Chandler and Hammett. In The Barbarous Coast, tough, thoughtful private eye Lew Archer pursues a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living. Archer's investigation leads him to an ex-fighter with an unexplained movie contract, a... Read More »
The Galton Case
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 6 hours 45 minutes
Abridged: No
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 aging and very rich 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... Read More »
The Wycherly Woman
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 8 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No
Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired Lew Archer to find her. That was plenty of time for a young girl who wanted to disappear to do so thoroughly—or for someone to make her disappear. And before he could locate the Wycherly girl, Archer had to reckon with the Wycherly woman, Phoebe’s mother, an eerily unmaternal... Read More »
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Edward Asner, Kathryn Harrold, Jennifer Tilly, Joe Pantoliano & a full cast
Length: 8 hours 1 minute
Abridged: No
Celebrated private eye Lew Archer is hired by a father intent on preventing the marriage of his daughter to a penniless and possibly murderous artist. The chase takes Archer from Mexico to Lake Tahoe and from the San Francisco Bay area to Los Angeles as more than one murder crowds the investigation. Read More »
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 8 hours 24 minutes
Abridged: No
Strictly speaking, Lew Archer is only supposed to dig up the dirt on a rich man’s suspicious soon-to-be son-in-law. But in no time at all, Ross Macdonald’s private eye is following a trail of corpses from the citrus belt to Mazatlan. And then there is the zebra-striped hearse and its crew of beautiful, sunburned surfers, whose path seems to keep... Read More »
The Chill
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 8 hours 24 minutes
Abridged: No
Lew Archer knew he shouldn’t have taken the case, but Alex Kincaid seemed so desperate. Kincaid’s loving new bride Dolly had just inexplicably walked out on him, leaving Kincaid more than a little fearful for her sanity—and her safety. So Archer reluctantly agreed to help Kincaid find her. But what he found instead was enough to send a chill... Read More »
The Far Side of the Dollar
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 8 hours 9 minutes
Abridged: No
Has Tom Hillman run away from his exclusive reform school, or has he been kidnapped? Are his wealthy parents protecting him or their own guilty secrets? And why does every clue lead Lew Archer to an abandoned Hollywood hotel, where starlets and sailors once rubbed shoulders with tycoons and hustlers? The once-popular palace is now boarded up,... Read More »
Black Money
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 7 hours 15 minutes
Abridged: No
When private investigator Lew Archer is hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave Frenchman who’s run off with his client’s girlfriend, it looks like a simple case of alienated affections. Things look different when the mysterious foreigner turns out to be connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts.
Black Money... Read More »
The Underground Man
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 7 hours 33 minutes
Abridged: No
As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, private investigator Lew Archer tracks a missing child who may be the pawn in a marital struggle or the victim of a bizarre kidnapping. What he uncovers amid the ashes is murder—and a trail of motives as combustible as gasoline.
The Underground Man is a... Read More »
Sleeping Beauty
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 7 hours 40 minutes
Abridged: No
Sleeping Beauty plunges private detective Lew Archer into a fascinating and intricate case connected to a disastrous oil spill on the southern California coast. It leads Archer 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,... Read More »
The Blue Hammer
By: Ross Macdonald
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 8 hours 14 minutes
Abridged: No
In this masterful Macdonald mystery, the desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness, and only Lew Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art.
The era is the 1970s, the settin, Southern California. Private investigator Lew Archer has been hired to retrieve a stolen canvas reputed to be the work of the... Read More »