Recommended reading: The Three Roads, by Ross Macdonald (1948):

The Three Roads

By Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard.

First published 1948.

Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0307740765

ISBN-13: 978-0307740762

Description:

[The] American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zentih by Macdonald. – New York Times Book Review.

Macdonald should not be limited in audience to connoisseurs of mystery fiction.  He is one of a handful of writers in the genre whose worth and quality surpass the limitations of the form. – Los Angeles Times.

Most mystery writers merely write about crime. Ross Macdonald writes about sin. – The Atlantic.

Without in the least abating my admiration for Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, I should like to venture the heretical suggestion that Ross Macdonald is a better novelist than either of them. – Anthony Boucher.

[Macdonald] carried form and style about as far as they would go, writing classic family tragedies in the guise of private detective mysteries. – The Guardian (London).

[Ross Macdonald] gives to the detective story that accent of class that the late Raymond Chandler did. – Chicago Tribune.

Silken skin pale against dark hair, red lips provocatively smiling at him – that’s how Lieutenant Bret Taylor remembered Lorraine. He was drunk when he married her, stone cold sober when he found her dead. Out on the sunlit streets of L.A. walked the man – her lover, her killer – who had been with her that fatal night. Taylor intended to find him. And when he did, the gun in his pocket would provide the quickest kind of justice. But first Taylor had to find something else: an elusive memory so powerful it drove him down three terrifying roads toward self-destruction – grief, ecstasty, and death.