My Dark Places

August 18, 1997
The novelist's gritty memoir features a new epilogue.

Narrator Michael Prichard's clipped, flat reading of police reports and court testimony in this audiobook is similar to the style of 1960s TV cops like Jack Webb's Joe Friday and Robert Stack's Eliot Ness. (Not coincidentally, both actors make important appearances in this memoir.) When the audiobook veers into personal recollections, Prichard takes the flatline off his delivery and swings with Ellroy's prose. The author juggles three balls in his powerful, sprawling true-crime memoir, written in 1996. There is the story of Ellroy's mother's murder and his attempts to solve it, his evolution from hooligan to crime writer, and his reflections on Los Angeles-based crimes against women from the Black Dahlia to Nicole Brown Simpson. Some listeners may be distracted by audible edits in this otherwise fine production. R.W.S. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine