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.