Noir as a genre earned its name from the play of shadows in film. Ellroy's The Black Dahlia is neo-noir made substance, reaching under the passing shade to find an abyss of paranoid corruption. Bucky Bleichert is a rising cop, a prizefighter partnered with Lee Blanchard. The two share the newspaper monikers Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice (Bleichert is Ice), and the love of a woman who is not quite the steady girlfriend of either of them. When an ordinary warrant check leads them into a vacant lot with the tortured and mutilated body of a young woman, the two of them are thrown into a maelstrom of obsession and revenge.

Blanchard sees solving the case as a way to redeem his murdered younger sister, an obsession that drives him off the edge of the world and to his eventual fate. Bleichert persues his partner, the case, and a wealthy heiress with family secrets. The Dahlia, the dead girl, is a mask ripped away from Los Angeles as an uneasy boomtown, seething with racial hatreds and old crimes.

Ellroy apparently fictionalized pretty much everything he wanted, but this isn't about facts. This is about the Truth, about what's at the center of a man or woman. And it's nothing pleasant.