A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age (U)

Set in roaring twenties Los Angeles, A BRIGHT AND GUILTY PLACE is the story of Leslie White, a budding pulp-fiction writer whose job as a crime-scene investigator for the city prosecutor’s office lands him in the middle of some of the biggest scandals of the × and Dave Clark, a charming prosecutor turned political candidate whose ambitions drive him into the bowels of L.A.’s thriving criminal underground. When Charlie Crawford, the Al Capone of L.A., meets his gruesome death, Clark, amazingly, emerges as the chief suspect. Richard Rayner portrays an L.A. controlled by organized crime, where brutal murders, spectacular trials, political misdeeds, and the sexual perversities of Hollywood starlets are chronicled in graphic detail in the tabloids; where writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett transformed a dark reality into gripping fiction; and whose events would inspire the shadowy L.A. of film noir. Joining bestselling histories of America's great cities, like Erik Larsen's The Devil in the White City and Luc Sante'sLow Life, this is a captivating chronicle of how the City of Angels lost its soul.