“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother's Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him so? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why, when she is discovered, dead, in Arizona, is he the first person the police suspect?<br><br> Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of  mid-century noir. In books like <i>In a Lonely Place </i>and <i>Ride the Pink Horse </i>she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of 20th-century prosperity. With <i>The Expendable Man</i>, first  published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story  that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.