Shortly after that Mr. Dowser, a big-time mobster and drug runner living near Pacific Palisades, offers him a retainer to find Tarantine, who has absconded with property of his.

Archer travels to Palm Springs, where Galley was last sighted, and is led to Joe Tarantine's hideout by her admirer Keith Dalling.

When he returns to Dalling's apartment, it is to find him shot; then later Tarantine's body is discovered in a motorboat awash on the rocks beyond the fictitious Pacific Point.

Following another lead, Archer discovers that Marjorie's husband, "Colonel Henry Fellows", is in fact Herman Speed, who has borrowed $30,000 from her to invest on her behalf.

She admits to having helped kill Joe and then Dalling and is about to shoot Archer when the badly injured Mario enters the room and she empties the gun into him before he will die.

And for Anthony Boucher, writing in The New York Times, "Macdonald has the makings of a novelist of serious calibre – in his vivid realization of locale; in his striking prose style…in his moving three-dimensional characterization…[It is] the best novel in the tough tradition I've read since Farewell, My Lovely and possibly since The Maltese Falcon.

"[3] Tom Nolan later described the novel in his biography of Macdonald as "A vivid tableau of postwar southern California and a stylish retelling of certain Greek myths".

Although he is capable of sympathy - and manifests it in his care to rehabilitate the teenage addict Ruth – his insight into the chaos of human relationships is mainly useful "as a means to follow his profession".