My Dark Places - James Ellroy Audiobook

Written by James Ellroy
Read by Michael Prichard
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: July 23, 2019
Duration: 14:31:26

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.

“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.”… AudioFile