Meet Me at the Morgue

[3] As Howard Cross, head of the county probation service, is on his way to work, he is introduced to four-year-old Jamie Johnson by the family chauffeur, Fred Miner.

Shortly after the two leave, Cross learns from Amy Miner that a ransom note has been delivered to the Johnsons at their Pacific Point home and her husband is suspected of being part of a kidnapping plot.

The boy's father leaves a suitcase containing $50,000 at the city railway station and Cross decides to investigate so as to exonerate Miner from blame.

When the victim's body is taken to the morgue, no one can identify him, but Cross' assistant Ann Devon believes she had seen him some months before, talking to the Johnson family lawyer, Larry Seifel.

Eventually Cross finds that he was Art Lemp and had been an associate of Kerry Snow, the previously unidentified hit and run victim.

Snow had served on the same ship as Miner during the war and had been imprisoned as a deserter in 1946 following information furnished by a red-haired woman.

Suspicion for this falls on Helen Johnson, Jamie's mother, and the possibility arises that the kidnapping was an act of revenge on her, with Miner abetting.

Macdonald responded that "I can write a sample of the ordinary hard-boiled mystery with my eyes closed" but wants to do something different, based on relationships; he believes that in this novel his own "characters are more human than in anything I've done, closer to life".