My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir

A Time Magazine Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, My Dark Places presents the harrowing autobiography of crime writer James Ellroy, who teamed up with a homicide cop as an adult to help solve the murder of his mother--an event that occurred when he was ten years old. Original, daring, brilliant.--Philadelphia Inquirer. nThe internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother. nIn 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself. n nIn My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten--and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.n