The Crime Writer

Summary

Twenty years after its original publication, an anniversary edition of this thrilling piece of contemporary LA noir by a master of the psychological thriller

Drew Danner, a crime novelist with a house off LA’s storied Mulholland Drive, awakens in a hospital bed with a scar on his head and no memory of being found convulsing over his ex-fiancée’s body the previous night. He was discovered holding a knife, her blood beneath him. He himself doesn’t know whether he’s guilty or innocent. To reconstruct the story, the writer must now become the protagonist, searching the corridors of his life and the city he loves.

Drew finds himself at the center of an ongoing murder investigation and the target of a series of increasingly bizarre psychological assaults that seem the result of his own dark imagination. As he closes in on clues he might or might not have left, another young woman is similarly murdered, and he has to ask difficult questions not only of others but of himself.

Beautifully crafted and heartbreakingly told, The Crime Writer confronts our inherent fear of what we might truly be capable of—good or evil. At once a noir nail-biter, a contemporary morality tale, and a vivid dissection of the crime novel itself.