Books like The Drowning Pool

This is the second book in the Lew Archer series, and with it MacDonald has produced the first of his many first-class mysteries. Archer is hired to track down a writer of blackmail letters, but soon the waters become murkier: someone drowns in an actual pool, and Archer's investigation of the murder reveals how the survivors are caught in an undertow of family wounds and crime.Archer shows us three effective portraits of women: an upper class lady who tightly controls her passions, her haunted, intellectual daughter, and a femme fatale with shady ties and suspicious motives. In addition, there's an effective study of a young psychopath on the make, a convincing portrait of a working class community being gradually destroyed by the depredations and easy money of recent industrial development, and a suspenseful and exciting account of how Archer escapes from the hydrotherapy room of a bogus psych hospital by creating a unique sort of "drowning pool."