SUMMARY:Ellroy's memoir centered around his reopening of the investigation of his mother's unsolved murder. The book evolved from an article Ellroy wrote for GQ Magazine about the experience of viewing his mother's homicide file.

PUBLISHER'S TEASER:

"On the night of 21 June 1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy left her home in El Monte, California. She was found strangled the next day. Her ten-year-old son James had been away with Jean's estranged husband all weekend and was confronted with the news on his return.

"Jean's murderer was never found, but her death had an enduring effect on her son who spent his teen and early adult years as a wino, petty burglar and derelict. Only later, through his obsession with crime fiction, an obsession triggered by his mother's murder, did Ellroy begin to delve into his past. Shortly after the publication of his ground-breaking novel White Jazz, Ellroy determined to return to Los Angeles and, with the help of veteran detective Bill Stoner, attempt to solve the thirty-eight-year-old crime.

"The result is one of the few classics of crime non-fiction and autobiography to appear in the last decades, a hypnotic trip to America's underbelly and one man's tortured soul."

—© CENTURY

POINTS:

The novel was first published by Scorpion Press in the U.K. as a limited edition. This edition, from Century, followed in the U.K. in hardcover (ISBN: 0-7126-7588-4) in 1996.

The Century edition totals 354 pages. The American edition came third from Knopf (ISBN: 0-679-44185-9) and totals 354 pages. A sheet signed by Ellroy (actually, he hastily initialed the pages) was bound into each copy of the 50,000 run of the U.S. first edition. Chosen as a Time Magazine Book of the Year.

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