Blood on the Moon [Paperback]

James Ellroy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 10, 2005

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can’t stand music, or any loud sounds. He’s got a beautiful wife, but he can’t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He’s a thinking man’s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent.

Now, there’s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A brilliant detective and a mysterious psychopath come together in a final dance of death.” --The New York Times

“One of the great American writers of our time.” — Los Angeles Times

“Ellroy is either our greatest obsessive writer or our most obsessive great writer. Either way, he is turning the crime novel’s mean streets into superhighways.” —Financial Times

“Nobody in this generation matches the breadth and depth of James Ellroy’s way with noir.” — Detroit News

"A blood poet who writes as chain saws crank, Ellry has vigorously redefined the well-shadowed turf of contemporary crime fiction." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"His spare noir style . . . hits like a cleaver but . . . is honed like a scapel." --Chicago Tribune

"Ellroy's characters are drawn with a firm brush, he has an excellent line in flinty, sardonic dialogue, and you terribly want to know how the whole thing is going to work out in the end." --The New York Times

"Our best living mystery writer. . . . Literate, suspenseful, honest. . . . His pages crackle with maniac energy. . . . Ellroy captures the vocabulary, the rituals, the smells and rhythms and colors of real people living on the edge. . . . Nobody since Chandler has evoked so perfectly the seamy side of LA." --Austin Chronicle

"Bold, electrifying. . . . Ellroy strips prose to its raw, gleaming bone. . . . James Ellroy is an American original, a sophisticated primitive as smooth as the snick-snick! of a pump shotgun and as subtle as the inevitable blast." --The San Diego Union-Tribune

"Ellroy's writing is powerful . . . his pacing relentless . . . his characters real. He is a major talent." --Miami Herald

"More than any other contemporary author, Ellroy gets inside the skull of the sadistic psychopath. . . . A true original." --Jonathan Kellerman

About the Author

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels–The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz–were international bestsellers. American Tabloid was Time’s Novel of the Year for 1995; his memoir My Dark Places was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996; his most recent novel, The Cold Six Thousand, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year for 2001. He lives on the California coast.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 262 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (May 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140009528X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400095285
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #644,968 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed L.A. Qurtet - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz, as well as the Underworld USA trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood's a Rover. He is the author of one work of non-fiction, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In some ways better than Harris' "Red Dragon", May 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Blood on the Moon (Paperback)

Ellroy has called this book a weak comparison to Harris' "Red Dragon", but I disagree. Then again, I wasn't impressed with "Red Dragon" because the main character, Will Graham, was too wrapped up in his own problems to throw himself into the mind of a serial killer. I was impressed with Ellroy's main character, Lloyd Hopkins, being a truly awful person but a great cop who disregards his personal life, feels a kinship for a killer and breaks all the rules to do what he knows he must to hunt down a monster. He really is crazy, whereas Will Graham just worried that he was going crazy. The story has the hard edge you'd expect from Ellroy's characters and crimes. This book was the basis for James Woods' 1987 movie "Cop," which has the story's grittiness down pat. Four stars - not five - because "LA Confidential" and "Black Dahlia" set a very high standard for Ellroy.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars OPUS THREE, August 7, 2001

By 

Daniel S. "Daniel" (Geneva, Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blood on the Moon (Hardcover)

Third book of James Ellroy and first novel of the Lloyd Hopkins trilogy, BLOOD ON THE MOON has been published in 1984.

Adopting for the first time in his career an omniscient point of view, James Ellroy describes two destinies meant to meet for a deadly encounter. Both men have suffered a traumatic sexual experience in their teen days. Lloyd Hopkins has become the best criminal investigator of the Los Angeles Police Department and spends his life protecting "the Innocence". On the contrary, "The Poet" has developed a serial killer syndrome and murders young women, repeating indefinitely the same vengeance scheme.

Unlike Fred Underhill, the main character of CLANDESTINE, Ellroy's precedent book, Lloyd Hopkins doesn't consider his job as redemptive, he simply sees it as the most important thing in his life and will therefore lose his wife. He is a missionary to whom to be the best means to be alone, in his job and in his life.

I've liked a lot the way James Ellroy compares the psychology of his protagonists who have to react in front of the same situations. I also remember very well the shock I had when I discovered BLOOD ON THE MOON in 1985 ; it was the first time in my life as a reader that I had the feeling that a thriller could be also literature.

A book for your library.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Death match with a serial killer, September 6, 2005

By 

Cory D. Slipman (Rockville Centre, N.Y.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Blood on the Moon (Paperback)

James Ellroy's squeamish stomach churning crime drama "Blood on the Moon" is an account of an analytical investigation of a series of murders that blighted the streets of Los Angeles over a period of approximately 20 years.

Ellroy's two main characters representing the pursued and the pursuer are both deeply developed, psychologically challenged and highly intelligent. Detective sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is the most successful homicide investigator on the L.A.P.D.. As a young cop he was mentored by veteran cop Arthur "Dutch" Peltz, now a captain, but soon the student became the teacher. Hopkins was so celebrated that he was able to function outside the guidleines of official police protocol. He was extremely brainy but also had his psychological warts. Although blessed with beautiful family and wife he was a relentless philanderer who also had an inexplicable aversion to music and loud noises. His analysis of a crime scene involving a murdered young woman uncovered clues leading to a pursuit of what he believed was a serial murderer.

His adversary, known as "the Poet" was himself in possession of a brilliant mind which he used to methodically plot out a series of murders to appease the playing out of his sexual fantasies. The Poet who exhibited covert and repressed homosexual tendencies was brutally raped as a slightly strange but innocent high school student. The rape committed by two fellow students came at a time when he was coveting an attractive but unattainable high school coed, totally shattering his conception of his own sexuality. The Poet turned to carefully stalking young women who reminded him of his high school beloved and murdering them. He was also keeping tabs of his rapists, one who was a homosexual street hustler who was protected by the other who was a L.A. sheriff's deputy.

Ellroy chronicles both the perpetration of a number of brutal murders as well as the probing investigation which leads to the inevitable showdown between the two main characters, a classic confrontation between good and evil. The lines of demarcation between the two, in part cleverly erased by the adroit Ellroy, were not well defined.