Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired to find a missing woman. Derace Kingsley's wife ran away to Mexico to get a divorce and marry a hunk named Chris Lavery. Or so the note she left her husband says. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it, he denies everything, but when Marlowe next encounters Lavery, he is denying nothing - on account of two bullet holes in his heart. Now Marlowe's on the trail of a killer who leads him out of smoggy Los Angeles all the way to a murky mountain lake. The fourth novel to feature the laconic PI.