Black Money by Ross Macdonald; A Lew Archer Novel, Book 13; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Stephen Sartarelli

When Lew Archer is hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave Frenchman who’s run off with his client’s girlfriend, it looks like a simple case of alienated affections. Things look different when the mysterious foreigner turns out to be connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts.

Black Money is Ross Macdonald at his finest, baring the skull beneath the suntanned skin of Southern California’s high society.

“The finest series of detective novels ever written by an American.” —New York Times

“A beautiful job…rich in plot and character…The denouement is both surprising and shocking and the whole is up to Mr. Macdonald’s extraordinarily high standards.” —New York Times Book Review

“Grover Gardner's voice is clear and tough, a natural for the hard-boiled first-person narrative. Macdonald’s story—involving gambling debts, murder, sex, and blackmail—is as satisfyingly gritty as one expects…Gardner's narration makes it all lively and fresh, rather than a nostalgic relic.” —AudioFile

“Ross Macdonald is one of the greatest American noir novelists, and this is arguably his best…Master professional narrator Grover Gardner, who becomes each carefully drawn character and captures the exact mood and the many varied accents in the dialog, is outstanding here…A classy narrator in a classic of the genre. Five stars!” —SoundCommentary.com

“It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe in some small but mattering way, how to live.”—Robert B. Parker

Ross Macdonald (1915–1983) was the pen name of Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco but raised in British Columbia, he returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. For over twenty years he lived in Santa Barbara and wrote mystery novels about the fascinating and changing society of his native state. He is widely credited with elevating the detective novel to the level of literature with his compactly written tales of murder and despair. His works have received awards from the Mystery Writers of America and of Great Britain, and his book The Moving Target was made into the movie Harper in 1966. In 1982 he was awarded the Eye Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Stephen Sartarelli is an award-winning translator and poet. He lives in France.