Recommended reading - The Blue Hammer, by Ross Macdonald (1976):

The Blue Hammer

By Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

First published 1976.

ISBN-10: 0307279065

ISBN-13: 978-0307279064

Description:

The desert air is hot with sex and betrayal, death and madness and only Detective Lew Archer can make sense of a killer who makes murder a work of art.

Finding a purloined portrait of a leggy blonde was supposed to be an easy paycheck for Archer, but that was before the bodies began piling up. Suddenly, Archer find himself smack in the middle of a decades-long mystery of a brilliant artist who walked into the desert and simply disappeared. He left behind a bevy of muses, molls, dolls, and dames-each one scrambling for what they thought was rightfully theirs.