The Galton Case (Lew Archer Series #8) » (~)

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 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. Devious and poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.

Gale Research

The Galton Case "was a watershed book," Joe Gores wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983, "the one in which [Macdonald] shook free of the Chandler influence and began to speak in his own unique voice." "It marks," Champlin believed, "a new dimension in the Ross Macdonald body of work."