My Dark Places - by James Ellroy (Paperback)

About the Book

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".

Book Synopsis

The 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.

In 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.

In 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.

Review Quotes

"Ellroy is more powerful than ever."
--The Nation

"Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

About the Author

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers. He is also the author of two collections, Crime Wave and Destination: Morgue! and two memoirs My Dark Places and The Hilliker Curse. Ellroy currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

www.jamesellroy.net