Los Angeles, 10th January 1947: a beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific destiny.Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood and cut in half. The newspapers called her 'The Black Dahlia'. Two cops are caught up in the investigation and embark on a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life ...A mesmerising study of psycho-sexual obsession ...extraordinarily well-written' The Times One of those rare, brilliantly written books you want to press on other people' Time Out A wonderful tale of ambition, insanity, passion and deceit Publishers Weekly.

I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them.Working backward, seeking only facts, I reconstructed her as a sad little gift and a whore, at best a could-have-been - a tag that might equally apply to me. I wish I could have granted her an anonymous end, relegated her to a few terse words on a homicide dick's summary report, carbon to the coroner's office, more paperwork to take her to potter's field. The only thing wrong with the wish is that she wouldn't have wanted it that way.As brutal as the facts were, she would have wanted all of them known. And since I owe her a great deal and am the only one who does know the entire story, I have undertaken the writing of this memoir.

But before the Dahlia there was the partnership, and before that there was the war and military regulations and maneuvers at Central Division, reminding usthat cops were also soldiers, even though we were a whole lot less popular than the ones battling the Germans and Japs. After duty every day, patrolmen were subjected to participation in air raid drills, blackout drills and fire evacuation drills that had us standing at attention on Los Angeles Street, hoping for a Messerschmitt attack to make us feel less like fools. Daywatch roll call featured alphabetical formations, and shortly after graduating the Academy in August of '42, that was where I met Lee.