Item: Blood on the Moon
Rating: 3.00
Author: knowledgelost

by James Ellroy

Somewhere out there is a murderer with over twenty killings to his name - each an apparently random slaying of a woman, over a twenty-year period and all unconnnected on the police files.

But Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins begins to see a pattern: he senses connections between this string of seemingly motiveless, pointless and unsolved killings. Then the murderer emerges not as a random killer, but a cool, efficient despatcher - in his own eyes a saver of souls and protector of the innocent.

As they are drawn inexorably together, Hopkins and the murderer challenge each other in a confrontation which pits icy intelligence against white-heated madness...

I normally love James Ellroy’s style and the hard-boiled/noir novels he writes. But Blood on the Moon just seems to be lacking the spark and excitement that I normally find in an Ellroy novel. Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkin is a character written to be hated and he doesn’t seem to be written well; sure I get the concept of a protagonist been hated but Hopkin feels sloppy, like if found all the most annoying habits and jammed it into this character. It is interesting to see how much Ellroy has improved over the years and after reading My Dark Places, how much his life was in the book. I would recommend reading the LA Quartet over the LA Noir series. I think I will read the rest of the books just to see the improvement in James Ellroy’s writing.

Blood on the Moon (Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy, #1) (Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, #1)

by James Ellroy

Reviewed by Michael @ Knowledge Lost on Jun 16, 2011

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