Steve's Reviews > The Black Dahlia

On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia —and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia— driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl’s twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches— into a region of total madness.

This was an intense, wild ride of a novel. Hidden motives, questionable morals, crooked cops, double-crosses, and a spiderweb of links to crime after crime after crime make this one of the best noir books ever written, maybe even one of the best books of all genres.

I wasn't intending on reading the next book in the series, The Big Nowhere, but James Ellroy is such a great writer, I'm rearranging my TBR list to accommodate the rest of the books in the LA Quartet.