The Zebra-Striped Hearse: Library Edition: 10 (Lew Archer)

This is completely and formally a detective novel, but with more meat on its bones than nine out of ten novels.

"A model of [Macdonald's] excellence...has character, statement, and style."

Macdonald is one of the elite in hard-boiled mystery fiction...[Gardner's] rendition is a first-class reading.

"This is hard-boiled detective writing at the top of its form."

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.