Ross MacDonald has 12 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 17 ratings. The most-rated is The Ivory Grin.
The Ivory Grin
Summary
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 private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin. A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he’s being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, run-down small town, but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit from ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who’s gone mysteriously missing.
©1952 Ross MacDonald, renewed 1980 by Margaret Millar (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Underground Man
Summary
As a mysterious fire rages through the hills above a privileged town in Southern California, 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.
©1998 Norman J Colavincenzo (P)2008 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Galton Case
Summary
In the character of Lew Archer, Ross Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin—and in so doing, gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. Deliciously devious and tersely poetic, The Galton Case displays Ross Macdonald at the pinnacle of his form. Almost 20 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 whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them.
©1959 Ross MacDonald, copyright renewed 1987 by Margaret Millar (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Drowning Pool
Summary
When a millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. Private investigator Lew Archer takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred - and sufficient motive for a dozen murders.
©1978 John Ross Macdonald (P)2001 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Moving Target
Summary
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 sanctuaries of the megarich to jazz joints where you can get beaten up between sets, The Moving Target blends sex, greed, misdirected love, and family hatred into an explosive crime novel.
©1977 John Ross Macdonald (P)2001 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Black Money
Summary
When 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 is Ross Macdonald at his finest, baring the skull beneath the suntanned skin of Southern California's high society.
©1993 Margaret Millar (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Find a Victim
Summary
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. More mayhem? Try our other Lew Archer mysteries.
©1954 Ross Macdonald (P)1997 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Wycherly Woman
Summary
Phoebe Wycherly was missing two months before her wealthy father hired 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 blonde who kept too many residences, had too many secrets, and left too many corpses in her wake.
©1961 Ross Macdonald; renewed 1989 by Margaret Millar (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Sleeping Beauty
Summary
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 for a haunting moment on the beach, clutching an oil-drenched sea bird in her arms - has disappeared, and while on her trail, Archer finds himself journeying into the hidden lives of a family twisted by money, power, and a compulsive instinct for infidelity. More mayhem? Try our other Lew Archer mysteries.
©1973 Ross Macdonald (P)1997 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
Summary
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 crossing the son-in-law's - and Archer's - in this powerful, fast-paced novel of murder on the California coast.
©1990 Margaret Millar Survior's Trust Fund (P)2001 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
Summary
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.
©2000 KCRW (P)2000 Ross MacDonald
The Dark Tunnel
Summary
Doctor Robert Branch was a university professor, not a secret agent. But his best friend was dead, and Branch knew that it couldn't have been suicide. He was also certain that the murder had been arranged by a Nazi espionage group operating on campus. The only trouble was, no one would believe him. Branch knew that the Nazis would have him eliminated as soon as it was convenient. He'd even narrowed his choice of executioner down to three: a psychotic homosexual, a respected educator, and the woman he loved.The Dark Tunnel was originally published in 1944 under Ross Macdonald's real name, Kenneth Millar.
©1944 Kenneth Millar (P)1998 Blackstone Audio Inc.