Reviews

ONLINE REVIEWS

LA's Noir Reality, by Rich Cohen
Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2009

Murder Most Noir , by Howard Blum
New York Times, July 10, 2009

City of Fallen Angels, by Carolyn See
Special to The Washington Post, Friday, June 26, 2009



PRAISE FOR A BRIGHT AND GUILTY PLACE


"Set in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties, A Bright and Guilty Place weaves the stories of two men, an idealistic crime-scene investigator and a charimastic politico, who stood on opposite sides of a scandal that shaped a city's identity and darkened its soul. Richard Rayner makes a masterful use of his material—sex, murder, corruption, greed, and the invention of noir—to concoct a seething, sinful tale worthy of Raymond Chandler himself. This is a narrative nonfiction at its best: meticulously researched, deftly drawn, and more compelling than anything the imagination might dare to conjure."

—Karen Abbot, author of Sin in the Second City



"A Bright and Guilty Place is a seductively readable knot of intersecting stories about pre-noir Los Angeles. It has an intriguing shape, a spectrum of emotions, beckoning suspense, satisfying inevitability, and a flavor all its own, at once familiar and strange."

—Luc Sante, outhor of Low Life



"Thanks to this detailed and cinematic narrative of desperate people in a desperate city, L.A. the place, L.A. the novel, L.A. the film are fused into a tour de force of L.A. noir."

—Kevin Starr, University of Southern California