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Started out decent, in fact I was really liking the first third of the book; perhaps a bit raw, as the author's first book, the off-kilter bits ended up rather charming, and there's plenty to like about the characters. The slice of life bits of settling in a town to a completely new lifestyle, while broke as all hell, were great.

As soon as Declan overnight evolves from a drunk lunatic into a rippling Irish Adonis and gentle father figure that Rosemary holds out on only long enough to add a few extra chapters, though, the writing takes a real nose-dive. At the same time, Rosemary becomes a total magical Mary Sue who needs no real training whatsoever. I won't spoil, but if you've ever read any urban fantasy book, you'll be able to guess all the plot points before you hit them.

One thing I'll give this book is that it feels no need to wrap up every conflict; from the start, it was obviously plotted as a series with room to breathe. My guess is by book 2 or 3 she'll be starting her own coven. I just won't be there to see how it plays out.

I've decided that while I'm a fan of PDK's short stories, I'm not at all a fan of his longer works, which are mostly grab-bag collections of futurism ideas held together in a disjointed psychedelic mindscape to hide the fact that there's little substance and no cohesion to the plot.

This book is a particularly unhinged fever dream, and deeply mired in the overt teen-aged sexism of SF before the impact of the New Wave, both of which equally turned me off. A large portion of it seems to be Dick wrestling with his own scattered, ever-evolving view of religion and transhumanism at the time, in a bridge from his early work to the more-coherent A Scanner Darkly, and thus characters are mere mouthpieces or audience. The writing also did it no favors, always pedestrian to the point of boredom. Every time something interesting started to happen, another dull monologue would commence.

Multiple times, I fell asleep reading the book, and each time the dreams it induced were far more interesting than what I came back to. Savage review, but it did less than nothing for me.

I wasn't sure quite what to make of Alison at first, since it seemed to waver between serious and silly in the beginning, especially once it moved from first-person Alison to third-person checkups on the rest of the cast, but once it truly settled down into gentle British absurdity I was fully on board with it. It's also short enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome.

Alison and Taron make for interesting, weird, sometimes bickering and sometimes loving friends, with a great arc of coming together to BFFs and slowly drifting back apart. I kind of know both of them from my own circle, so maybe that helps me put up with them -- by far the highlight of the book. The side characters are different slices of zany, more than they are people, but help flesh out a tale that needs extra humor to keep moving, since Alison can be a tab too morose on her own. It's surprising how far back the whole initial detective concept can be pushed and still keep going.

The ending was 100% channeling Douglas Adams. The absurdity knob can indeed go to 11!

This doesn't seem to be part of a series, which is too bad, as I had just started getting to know these folks. But perhaps that was enough.

Some books are just practically impossible to reduce to stars, and I feel that way about The Black Dahlia.

The thing is, I know I'll be reading the rest of the Quartet, if only because LA Confidential is one of the best movies I've ever seen, and I know there's plenty more. So I can't stop, obviously. But the sheer vile brutality the first half revels in is just too much at times; I should have at least checked reviews to steel myself to the endless casual racial epithets and casual cop violence I was immediately thrown into. Bucky's superiority complex and self-loathing that went along with it could grate at times, but Ellroy took no pains whatsoever to try to convince you that he was a hero, merely one of the least horrible of a whole cast of monsters.

The second half tightened up significantly, losing the violence for shock's sake, bring a greater pathos and a much more substantial lone gumshoe story.

The ending was disappointing; aside from being too neat and tidy to match the grisly tone of the beginning, it was just a grand conspiracy unraveled over the course of the final few chapters, ensuring that everything makes sense and nobody keeps a secret by the end.

It was a good book and it was a terrible book. I'm still really mixed up about it. In that respect, as least it's memorable.