Reviews for Angel in black

The average rating for Angel in black based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-04-10 00:00:00 Judy Taylor Atmospheric, vividly told if misogynistic detective fiction. I don't read a whole lot of this genre, and have never read any of Max Allan Collins' books prior to this 2001 effort. The author assuredly has a gift for vivid, historically accurate scene-setting and enjoyably salty (yet coarse) dialogue, although the forced alpha-male posturing gets a bit wearying. This particular book puts Collins' regular detective, pragmatic He-Man Nathan Heller, in the aftermath of the most notorious real-life murder in 1940s Los Angeles. Yep, it's the gruesome slaying of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia. The plot picks up on the theory that Short's heinous murder served as a message from one slimy mob boss to another about the consequences of squealing to the cops. Despite the fact that Nathan Heller never emerges as a particularly complex or interesting character (compared with somebody like John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, anyhow), the story itself has enough twists and turns to make it intriguing enough. Fans of 1940s L.A. and Hollywood will enjoy this more than others.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-20 00:00:00 John Chen Another interesting mix of real events and the fictional Nathan Heller A-1 Detective. He is expanding to LA and is one of the people who finds the body of Elizabeth Short ( the Black Dahlia ). To try and hide his knowledge of the lady he is working with the Hearst papers and the police to hunt down the real killer. The links to Hollywood, the two leading gangsters of the post war era in LA and his own family issues cloud the matter until leads open to tie in with the serial murders in Cleveland where Heller and Elliot Ness worked to solve.