A wealthy Pasadena widow with a mean streak, a missing daughter-in-law with a past, and a gold coin worth a small fortune -- the elements don't quite add up until Marlowe discovers evidence of murder, rape, blackmail, and the worst kind of human exploitation.

A local rock festival appears to be going off without a hitch, until the terribly disfigured body of a local girl turns up in a nearby quarry, and the prime suspect becomes charismatic rock star Zeno Vedast.

"In Chandler's final novel, Marlowe is hired by an influential lawyer he's never heard of to tail a gorgeous redhead, but decides he prefers to help out the redhead. She's been acquitted of her alcoholic husband's murder, but her father-in-law prefers not to take the court's word for it." -- Back cover.

A routine investigation of a diamond robbery involves an insurance detective in a bizarre case of murder, and cult worship.

"Mildred Pierce had gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She used those attributes to survive a divorce and poverty and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men, and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements, Cain creates a novel of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions...

Trouble waits around the corner when the very handsome, polite, and friendly William Collins, a man who is also very easily aroused, breaks out of his fourth mental institution and falls in with a con man and a woman of ill repute.

When a case of blackmail involving the daughter of a California millionaire leads to murder, the inimitable Philip Marlowe is stirred into action as he becomes embroiled in a troublesome case of extortion complicated by kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder.

Marlowe is constantly on the move with a case involving a war-scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife. A psychotic gangster is on his trail; he is in trouble with the cops; and an unequaled number of corpses turn up.