America's greatest living crime writer gives us a raw, brutally candid memoir-as high intensity and as riveting as any of his novels-about his obsessive search for "atonement in women."

The year was [...] Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden [...] son, James, was ten years [...] hated and lusted for his mother and "summoned her dead." She was murdered three months later.

The Hilliker Curse is a predator's confession, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all a cri de cur. Ellroy unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her.

A layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of [...] is unlike any memoir you have ever read.