Black Dahlia Avenger

The New York Times–bestselling reveal of the Black Dahlia killer. “Completely convincing . . . As far as I’m concerned, the case is closed” (Michael Connelly). In 1947, the brutal slaying of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short resulted in the largest manhunt in Los Angeles history. The killer’s identity remained a mystery. Decades later, private investigator and former LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel launched his own investigation into the most tantalizing unsolved case of the last century. It led to a shockingly unexpected perpetrator: Hodel’s own father. Next came an equally blindsiding discovery. The Black Dahlia was not a standalone crime. Between 1943 and 1949, the cold-case “Lone Woman” serial murders haunted the Southern California area. All of them, Hodel believes, committed again by a one real-life Jekyll and Hyde: Dr. George Hill Hodel. In Black Dahlia Avenger, Steve Hodel “paints a chilling, detailed, week-by-week, year-by-year portrait of his father as an intellectual giant driven to serial killing by his arrested emotional development, his hatred of women and his obsessions with money, power and sex” (Los Angeles Times). Including never-before-published forensic evidence, photographs, previously unreleased documents, and the author’s own intimate perspective of a terrifying family psychodrama, Hodel “has written one of the most compelling true-crime books of all time . . . the most noir of noir stories” (Seattle Weekly).