The afterward reveals the book to be a labour of love for the author. A deeply felt reaction to a crime commited before his birth and the murder of his own mother.

In truth even without the afterward it's not hard to understand that the book is passionately personal.

It has a smoky dizzy atmosphere like a dream or a bad trip or insipient madness. An increadibly physical book, as you're pulled hotly along you can feel the bones breaking, the cuts opening, the blood flowing, the characters breathing, sweating and it's a unstable physicallity that confuses violence and sex and indeed by the end the difference between the two isn't always readibly discernable. And in tandem the whole concept of love become amorphous, confused but strangely all encompassing. People love the people they kill, hate the people they love, corpses become objects of desire and passionate love affairs include three of four people at a time.

This physical primacy means that in the background one notices the plot sprawling off into some kind of unholy mess - characters appear and dissapear, plot threads are taken up and the die with a whimper, so many lies are told that it's hard to keep track of what's happening and the ending twists so frequently that even after the last word oone has the feeling that perhaps something more was meant to be said.

But it's an effective mess. The whole point of the book is it's apparent messiness - like Betty Short's tangled corpse - it's nasty, shocking and fascinating.

LA becomes a hell. Casual, violent racism, objectification of the poor and women, corruption, hopelessness and a lot of nasty, powerful people on the make.

There aren't any entirely admirable characters in the book. Few who do the right thing in a tough situation and "Good" as a concept doesn't really exist. The protagonist is often deeply suspect and his catalystic role is more equivalent to a bull in a china shop than a traditional hero. He's violent, clumsy and insataibly curious. Meaning that accidentaly punching the right person is frequently the way forward. But beneath his rawness he is also shrewdly clever, a dazzling detective that just isn't respectable enough.

Interestingly enough I just read "House of Leaves" another book set in LA featuring people drive mad by obsession. However whilst that book was a dry accademic excersise, this book made me belive it and made it scary.

Finaly it should be noted how effective a period novel it is. Whilst it takes a few leads from the hard boiled noir genre it uses the real lived in past to over turn the cliches or to fill them with truth. The language is not always entirely transparrent but it is vivid and worn in and alive. The politics are convinvingly byzantine and the intertwining of real events of the time, the film world and the characters personal lives works beautifully.