My Dark Places is James Ellroy's autobiographical account of his mother's unsolved murder -- an event that occurred when he was ten years old and deeply affected his life and, subsequently, his writing. It's a subject which he had touched on often before, directly or indirectly, but in this book, he took it on full-force -- from endless digging into old police files to lurid confessionals of his years as a drug-addled drifter. It's an unusual read... much of it is like reading through police reports, well, he's quoting police reports. This is almost disorientingly balanced with his own very personal autobiographical story. It's almost a miracle the guy survived his teen and young adult years, let alone getting his act together to become a prolific and successful writer. A steady diet of the cotton wads inside Benzedrex inhalers is not good nutrition. Harrowing stuff, but it does provide a lot of insight into his fiction. In the final third of the book, Ellroy hooks up with a retired L.A. County Sheriff's Dept. homicide detective to reopen his mother's case. Many more murder cases are examined along the way. By the end of the book, you're feeling somewhat numb, but there does seem to be an exhausted sort of catharsis. A book that will never track quite the way you expect it to.