Ross Macdonald, The Way Some People Die ****

The first book I've read from the third member of the holy trinity of detective novels (Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald), purchased at BookPeople in Austin TX. It is one of Macdonald's earlier works (1951), and it reads very much like a Raymond Chandler story. His detective, Lew Archer, has a more explicit moral sense than Chandler's Marlowe, but otherwise the story has similar locales, similar plotting, and similar characters. Which is a good thing on the whole — although I did figure out the basics of the final resolution fairly early.

So, if you like Raymond Chandler you'll almost certainly like Ross Macdonald. And he wrote more novels than Hammett and Chandler combined! For my next Macdonald book, I'll choose one of his later ones from the 1970s.