The Drowning Pool

Product Description

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. In
The Drowning Pool, 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.

Amazon.com Review

Most writers who work in a specific genre such as science fiction or detective stories write with a comfortable narrowness, their ambitions constricted by well-worn conventions; a rare few attain something much deeper, as the scope of their explorations and the originality of their prose operate in a kind of tension with the genre’s confines. Ross Macdonald is one such writer. In a series of 25 novels written between 1944 and 1976, all but five featuring Lew Archer as protagonist, Macdonald picked up the baton dropped by and and took the genre to new heights.
The Drowning Pool, first published in 1950, is the second Lew Archer novel. It opens in classic hard-boiled fashion, with a well-dressed woman hesitantly engaging Archer’s services at his L.A. office. Soon he’s digging up secrets in her oil-rich hometown, and the themes that preoccupied Macdonald throughout his career begin to emerge: tormented families, buried secrets that fester through multiple generations, environmental destruction, concealed paternity, and the brutal contrast between rich and poor. Macdonald’s later novels–including (1959), (1964), and (1971)–showed increased maturity and a tone less tied to tradition, but The Drowning Pool returns to the virtues that are the hallmarks of Mcdonald’s work: complex and compelling plotting, psychological depth, just enough mayhem, and highly economical prose that routinely rises to something near poetry.

From Library Journal

Published in 1965, 1963, and 1950, respectively, this trio feature Macdonald’s hard-boiled private detective Lew Archer. The plots involve murder, deceit, blackmail, sex, and all those other goodies that make for great crime stories.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap

onaire matriarch is found floating face-down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. In
The Drowning Pool, 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.

From the Back Cover

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. In The Drowning Pool, 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.

About the Author

Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Canada, Millar returned to the U.S. as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.