a typical Chandler but not his best work

short plot description: Philip Marlowe is hired by Derace Kingsley to find his wife Crystal. She has left him four weeks ago and send him a telegram that she will divorce him and marry her boyfriend Chris Lavery. But Lavery denies any knowledge of this when he meets Derace Kingsley by chance and now it is up to Marlowe to find out what really happened to Crystal Kingsley. And when he starts his investigation at the last place where Crystal was seen, a mountain resort called Little Fawn Lake where Kingsley has a house, and finds another woman drowned in the lake who had disappeared at the same time as Crystal things are getting complicated...

my thoughts: a typical work for Chandler's style, noir and cynical in tone and none of the characters has clean hands. This book felt "talky" in places, Marlowe explains several times at which point in the investigation (and in the plot) he currently stands which doesn't feel right and forced.
Otherwise a good novel by Chandler.

my advice: can be read stand alone but I suggest reading Chandler's novels chronologically.