James Ellroy's reimagining of one of Hollywood's most notorious unsolved mysteries.
Who killed the Black Dahlia, the young woman whose gruesomely dismembered and violated body was found in 1947? The real-life case remains unsolved to this day, but author James Ellroy takes a satisfying whack at solving the mystery in the noir novel The Black Dahlia.

“Cherchez le femme,” Lee Blanchard advises Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert. Ah, but which femme? The two men start as rivals in the boxing ring, become partners in the LAPD’s Warrants division and end up obsessed with three women. The alive one, Kay Lake, a former gangster’s moll, lives with Lee but falls for Bucky. Then there’s the dead one, Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet whose body is discovered in a vacant lot. Assigned to investigate her murder, Bucky tangles with a third, bisexual femme fatale Madeline, who claims to have slept with the murdered girl, while Lee disappears, like Short another victim of the dark side of the Hollywood dream.

The 11 ½-hour audiobook makes Dahlia ideal for eating up highway miles and prowling nighttime city streets; less so for carpooling the kids to soccer practice. Steven Hoye’s spare narrative style suits Ellroy’s hard-boiled prose and imbues Bucky’s obsessive quest with just the right degree of world-weariness.