When Lew Archer is hired to find out the truth about a suspiciously suave Frenchman who has run off with his client's girlfriend, it looks like a simple enough case. But things start to look very different when Archer connects the elusive foreigner to a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts. This is Ross Macdonald at his finest, revealing the skull beneath the sun-kissed skin of Southern California.