At his best, Marlowe is very good, but a serious misogynous thread runs through his work. Women are treated as objects at best, and in this book, one woman is treated far worse than that. She is a doctor who has helped the protagonist recover from a serious accident which has left him with amnesia. As readers, we know that the protagonist's wife and brother tried to kill him by running his car into a Florida canal. Miraculously, he survives, and the rest of the story is pretty fascinating as he reunites with his wife, who has a change of heart when she sees her "dead" husband return home thirty pounds lighter and sexually reinvigorated. There is a lot of interesting stuff here and some good action, but it's hard to like this book too much. ( )