Recommended reading - The Instant Enemy by Ross Macdonald (1968):

The Instant Enemy

By Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

ASIN: B07R5PYF7Q

Published by Alfred A. Knopf.

First published 1968.

First Edition.

Hardcover.

Description:

“Moves fast and is full of surprises. . . . The best work Macdonald has done in years.” – The New York Times.

“A more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were.” – Eudora Welty.

“Archer has seldom been in better form, and neither has his estimable creator.” – The New Yorker.

“Lew Archer is back, careening down the bloody trail of women who were beaten to death, a murdered cop, and a dead hobo who is the key to a 15-year-old family secret that won't die. "(The) American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald". – New York Times Book Review.

Lew Archer is hired by Keith Sebastian, a Los Angeles business executive, to find his daughter Sandy, a high-school senior who has run off with a homeless boy. Sebastian and his wife, living on the on the edge of affluent bankruptcy, seem unable to communicate with their daughter. Archer finds the runaways easily enough, but before he can return Sandy to her parents, she has participated in a violent crime. Archer’s efforts to save the girl from the consequences of her actions, and to understand those actions, involve him in a savage plot twisting deep into the past. At least one old murder and some new ones confound him and the police. Archer himself is very nearly killed by an ex-cop who wants to keep the case closed, but he finally manages to open it and let some daylight in. The Instant Enemy is Lew Archer at his toughest, and Ross Macdonald at his most trenchant in his observations of California society.