"One of the 'Big Three' in American hard-boiled detective fiction (with Chandler and Hammett), MacDonald makes a routine story of ocean side murder among the rich take on a hard-edged, glistening solidity....Tom Parker reads with great skill, shading primarily by accent rather than by tone or volume. A prissy character sounds prissy, a Mexican-American has the faintest of Spanish accents, and the first-person protagonist sounds a little weary, a little cynical, a little lonely. This is an excellent presentation of an excellent crime novel."--AudioFile

"Lew Archer has evidenced his differences from the usual run of fictional private eyes. He is not obsessed with bed, bottle and boodle; he doesn't indulge in unnecessary violence, in action or in language; he is a sensitive and thoughtful man, tough enough to survive in a dangerous profession but moved rather to pity than cynicism by the way the world goes."--New York Herald Tribune

In The Barbarous Coast, Lew Archer's pursuit of a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living leads him to an ex-fighter with an unexplained movie contract, a big-time gambler who died by his own knife, and finally to an answer he would rather not have known.