Blood on the Moon

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.