Hey now, what's this? A book review? No way!

I finally, finally have a book review. Yes, it's been over six months, but I got one. And it is good. The book, that is.

I've been reading Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt, and so far I'm liking it much more than Possession, so that's really good. But this review is not about either of those books. I might have gotten a little sidetracked. Which tends to happen a lot with me and books, you know. See, I finally got my act together and got a Yolo County library card and I went and checked out a book I've been meaning to read for awhile now. And that book is The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy.

And it was a great book. Really, I stayed up way past my bedtime last night in order to finish it, because the ending...wow. So cray cray. I'm also a total sucker for a good murder mystery, thanks to my grandmother, who started me on mysteries at a young age and let me watch Murder She Wrote as a kid. Because don't all 8 year olds want to watch Angela Landsbury solve a small town murder? Thought so. I think this is what started my obsession with procedural crime shows. Seriously, I watch so many and I never get sick of them: Law and Order, CSI, Bones, Criminal Minds..it never ends.

Anyhoo, back to the book review portion of this post. So The Black Dahlia takes place in Los Angeles in the 1940s and centers around the infamous unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short AKA the Black Dahlia, basically one of the most famous unsolved cases is LAPD history. It's narrated by a cop, Dwight "Bucky" Bleichert, and starts of with his not to great ascent in the police department until he is partnered with Lee Blanchard and they are assigned to the Black Dahlia case in 1947. The story then chronicles the exhaustive and extensive investigation by the LAPD, with nearly 200 officers on the case and how the Black Dahlia begins to take over the lives of Bucky and Lee, eventually leading to their spectacular downfalls. Throw in a mysterious woman from a messed up wealthy family, gangsters, depraved sexual tendencies, lots of police corruption, and tragedy and you have one great neo-noir thriller.

I have to say, Ellroy really made this story come alive for me while I was reading it. He uses correct the correct lingo of the time, even when it is highly racist (this was the 1940s, after all, pre-civil rights), he gets pretty gruesome when describing the Dahlia's death, (which I will not detail here as there was some pretty gross stuff), and he clearly did research into the actual murder investigation in order to give the story some accuracy. But, it still is fiction, after all. Not to mention it has one hell of an ending. Lots of twists and turns, lots of destruction both physically and emotionally, violence, intrigue. It was awesome.

The Black Dahlia is like many other mystery novels, in that there is some portions of the book which are kind of filler feeling, like recounting what Bucky does when he gets of work. Do I really care about that? No. But does it kind of add to the story? Yes. Plus the first few chapters are kind of boring in that they just set up to show how Bucky came to be a police officer and be partnered with Lee. It's kind of interesting, but I just wanted to get to the murder, which does come as a surprise and right when you are ready for some action in the story.

This book was definitely one of the better mysteries I have read in recent years, so I highly recommend it, especially for a good summer read. This book was also the first in Ellroy's LA Quartet, books let in Los Angeles in the 1940s and 50s that showed Los Angeles as a hotbed of political corruption and depravity. I really like noir and neo-noir mysteries, so I plan on reading the rest of the books as well. If The Black Dahlia is any indication, I think I'm going to really like them, too.

Now, back to Babel Tower and maybe one day I'll finally write a review for that one as well!