Meet Me at the Morgue

By Ross Macdonald

Somebody in Pacific Point is guilty of a kidnapping, but what probation officer Howard Cross wants to find most is innocence: in an ex-war hero who has taken a tough manslaughter rap, in a wealthy woman with a heart full of secrets, and in a blue-eyed beauty who has lost her way.  The trouble is that the abduction has already turned to murder, and the more Cross pries into the case the further he slips into a pool of violence and evil.  Somewhere in the California desert the whole scheme may come down on the wrong man.  Somewhere Cross is going to find the last piece of a bloody puzzle—a mystery of blackmail, passion, and hidden identities that might be better left unsolved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 7, 2010
• ISBN: 9780307740755

Ross Macdonald

Ross MacDonald is an illustrator whose work has appeared in international publications. He lives in Connecticut.

Reviews for Meet Me at the Morgue

[jonathan_m-100054 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

*Partial spoilers ahead*This was my first experience with the author's non-Lew Archer novels. It takes several chapters for Macdonald to establish probation officer Howard Cross as the book's authoritative voice, but once the wheels get rolling there's no essential difference between Cross and Archer. (The PO is a little more awkward than Macdonald's classic private eye: there's an interesting scene in which, hovering on the brink of exhaustion, he allows a female suspect to get the jump on him and spends a hair-raising moment looking down the barrel of his own gun. It's something that probably wouldn't happen to Archer, but such mishaps make Cross feel believably human to the reader.) A four-year-old boy has been kidnapped, and the lead suspect is an ex Navy man who works as a chauffeur for the boy's wealthy parents and was responsible for a hit-and-run accident several months earlier; while attempting to track down his probationer, Cross encounters a cast of broken and often dangerous characters who will seem familiar to the seasoned Macdonald fan.The Warner/Grand Central paperback edition from 1991 is loaded with typos, but you get used to them as the story begins to carry you along. Three and a half stars.