Detailed item info | Size | | Height: | 8.5 in. | | Width: | 5.5 in. | | Thickness: | 1.2 in. | | Weight: | 14.4 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | "Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant." --Philadelphia Inquirer 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. "Ellroy is more powerful than ever." --The Nation
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".
| | Industry reviews | "...[T]here are long portions of 'My Dark Places' that will remind Mr. Ellroy's readers of his novels....Because Mr. Ellroy recounts all the dead ends, all the wild goose chases, all the tips that failed to pan out, his narrative sometimes feels frustratingly elliptical and static. In taking us through their work, step by step, however, he also conveys to us the painstaking nature of police work and the grueling emotions he experienced as his mother's would-be avenger."
New York Times - Michiko Kakutani (11/06/1996)
"Although, without doubt, Ellroy would have liked to have nailed his mother's killer, what he craved, beyond justice, was catharsis."
Literary Review - Philip Oakes (11/19/1996)
"Well known for genre-mixing and -bending, Ellroy here makes his biggest leap yet: a true-crime detective story, an L.A. social history and a kind of romance. The result of a twisted literary memoir, the white-hot spinning of a loner and autodidact."
Nation - Emily Gordon (12/02/1996)
"'My Dark Places' is an important book for the genre because, like most valuable crime books, it transcends the genre. It speaks of bleak tragedy and a search for a lost boy and his equally lost mother far more than it solves a mystery."
Washington Post Book World - Ann Rule (11/24/1996)
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