Blood on the Moon

By James Ellroy

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9780593312247

Reviews for Blood on the Moon

[vesper1931 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins seems to be a genius at his job but so much in his private life. But his insight provides a link with the deaths of females over the last twenty years if only he could convince his superiors to provide the manpower.
Strangely I think overall I really enjoyed the book, but it had its moments when I was not too sure of that.

[john.cooper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When James Ellroy wrote his third novel, he was a long way from developing the unique skills that makes his later fiction so compelling. "Blood on the Moon" is interesting as the work of a fascinating writer in embryo; it's not interesting or rewarding in its own right. The trouble is in his characters, who don't behave, talk, or act in realistic ways. In particular, the main female character seems like a lonely teenager's idea of an intelligent woman, her words (especially her poems and journal entries) all in feverish early high-school style. The villain also seems like a surly freshman's fantasy alter ego, twisted, powerful, and (of course) self-loathingly gay. Where the later Ellroy largely omits psychologizing in favor of ultra-concise description and expertly deployed violence, here we have to suffer through long passages of purple thought passages that are just icky where they should be terrifying. Fortunately, there is better to come.

[ecw0647 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ellroy writes with intensity. As I’m sure everyone knows who is remotely interested in his writing, Ellroy has been obsessed with the death of his mother (nee Hilliker) whose murder was never solved. The Black Dahlia, written after this book, was an unsatisfactory attempt at atonement, and the books I’ve read of his continue to obsess with familial relationships.

That’s especially true of Blood on the Moon, first in the Lloyd Hopkins police series. Lloyd is that special cop who sees beyond the obvious and has a brilliant track record catching the bad guys. But his relationship with Janice, his wife, whom he loves, and his children, whom he wishes above all to protect by telling them stories of his life on the streets lest they experience them themselves, and his senile parents whom he promised to keep in their home, and his brother who he coerces to maintain them --“are you going to kill me Lloyd when our parents are dead?” Why? because of some incident at Christmas when Lloyd was 8, even if it was rather horrific, and the women he saves and sleeps with. All of these relationships form a convoluted psyche that Ellroy explores brilliantly, I think. Lloyd’s affair with Kathleen, a former schoolmate and now feminist bookstore owner reveals his “rapacious ego” and driven obsession as a foil to the obsession of the serial killer, whom Lloyd believes to be a gay man driven to kill women because of his own tormented self-identity.

Hints to Ellroy’s obsession with the death of his mother abound on the pages. At one particularly gruesome homicide, Lloyd cuts down the 29-year-old female victim, before the ME has had a chance to check out the scene, cradles her body in his arms, and murmurs how he won’t let her murderer go free and he’ll render justice. It reeks of romance, vengeance, and an idealized perception of women. We learn the origin of Lloyd’s obsessive behavior toward the end of the book, although I found the scene less than convincing. His relationship with Kathleen also had a surreal quality to it that I thought jarred with the rest of the book.

There’s a thread in modern detective literature that the bad guys can’t get caught unless the rules are broken. Lloyd certainly breaks many of them in his own personal vigilante quest for his personal justice. It’s a theme I find insidiously subversive, and really if Lloyd had followed the rules in this book the carnage would have been much less.

[alleycat07 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I almost stopped reading this book. The writing style is quite strange. I finished , perhaps, 40% of the book and was just about to stop reading it when it finally got on track. Nevertheless, the style of writing was wandering and the character behavior and dialog quire strange. This is the first book in a three part series. I won't devote the time to read the rest of the series. Too much better stuff out there to read.

[ozzieslim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If you are an Ellroy fan, you will probably notice his style in this the first of the “Lloyd Hopkins” books. Set in the seedy parts of Los Angeles Lloyd Hopkins is a hard boiled detective. The whole tone of the book is noir and Ellroy has a style of writing that is very visceral – it drives home the violence and the darkness with such authority that you don't realize how tense you have been until you put the book down.Lloyd is married but he has a complicated relationship with his wife and several other women in the book including his daughters. Ellroy's mother was killed in Los Angeles around the time the Black Dahlia murder occurred. There is a lot of Freudian working it out with the mother figure in all his books but the true delight of that is that the women are complicated. This book extends that theme. There are the hopeful Hollywood wannabe's; the sometimes straight sometimes lesbian poetess; the loving wife who is getting fed up with Lloyd and the daughters whose bed time stories consist of Lloyd descriptions of all the gruesome goings on in the City of Angels.To top off the mayhem, there is a crazy serial killer and a bunch of people both legal and illegal tainted by all the sex, drugs, violence and corruption that Hollywood can offer. Included in this group is Lloyd's actual family which is as complicated and dysfunctional as Lloyd.This a solid three and a half stars. It's early Ellroy so the style is still raw but you can see the beginnings of what will be classic Ellroy writing style. Good book.

[capewood · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

2022 book #66. 1984. Brilliant but unstable homicide cop in LA believes his latest case is the work of a serial killer but his superiors disagree. He finds a horrifying connection, he and the killer are in love with the same woman. Much too brutal of a story for me.