This is the only book of Ellroy's I've read, and I don't know that I'll read another. On many levels this is an excellent book, but I found myself disgusted again and again by his violently misogynistic views of sex and sexuality. A grim, dark, and disturbing book. ( )

This book has taught me, if I’m going to read a book about something that really happened, I need to do some research. Let me go ahead and throw this out there: This book uses some facts from the case, but fuses fact with fiction. I didn’t know that until I got to the end of the book and read that the two main characters, other than the Dahlia were made up. Before I got that far, I couldn’t understand why the case was never solved because the book told me who did it. Wow, did I feel dumb.

Before the last few chapters, I would have only given this book one bookmark. It was not what I expected. It is kind of dirty (yes, I’m being a prude again). There’s a lot of sex and it’s pretty morbid. I expected the morbidity, just not all the sex. Everything I read about the Dahlia says people speculated she was a hooker but it wasn’t true, so when the book kind of played off that, I didn’t know what to believe.

The last few chapters, however, bring it all together. I was very surprised at who was pegged the killer and even more surprised at how “Bucky” handled the news.

I’m more of a high heel and handbag book kind of girl. I personally would say this is more of a guys book about cops and boxing.

I did think it was written well. When I read it, I really felt like I was in the 40’s. I really like, looking back now, how many facts he used in the book and how he played off them to make this a novel. Everyone can hear about a murder and put a story together about how it happened, but this was a good story.

Looking back at the writing, especially towards the end, I’m going to give this book 3 bookmarks. If you can push through the first 3/4 of the book, the last 1/4 is great and an intriguing read to find out who’s the Dahlia’s killer (fake killer, they never solved it). ( )

Words cannot express my disappointment with this book. The idea of this book was intriguing, but the story was very underwhelming. It could have been SO much better. ( )

This book was a bit difficult to get into at first, mainly because of the slang but also because the story didn't really get going until the body was found a little while into the book. Still an enjoyable cimre/mystery book though, and very exciting towards the end! ( )

http://booklog.molehill.org/2009/04/2... ( )