The Black Dahlia (L.A. Quartet #1) » (Unabridged)

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels–The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz–were international bestsellers. American Tabloid was Time’s Novel of the Year for 1995; his memoir My Dark Places was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996; his most recent novel, The Cold Six Thousand, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year for 2001. He lives on the California coast.

James Ellroy s classic is newly re-recorded with Stephen Hoye as narrator.

On January 15, 1947 the tortured body of a beautiful young woman was found in a vacant lot in Hollywood. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, a young Hollywood hopeful, had been brutally murdered. Her murder sparked one of the greatest manhunts in California history. In this fictionalized treatment of a real case, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, both LA cops obsessed with the Black Dahlia, journey through the seamy side of Hollywood to the core of the dead girl s twisted life.

Building like a symphony, this is a wonderful, complicated, but accessible tale of ambition, insanity, passion and deceit. Publishers Weekly

Salon - David Bowman

Ellroy indulges in every cliche of the genre (the two-fisted loner, the femme fatale, the twisted gunsel), but triumphantly reinvents each because he is convinced he is rebuilding noir from scratch. Hooray for delusion. In his best book, Ellroy fictionalizes the notorious true story of the murder of a Los Angeles whore (literally sliced in two), using the poor girl as a psychic stand-in for the novelist's own murdered mother.