Review of Lynda La Plante's The Red Dahlia
A Modern-Day Killer Re-enacts the 1940s Murder of "The Black Dahlia"
Sep 4, 2009
Young Detective Inspector Anna Travis has a horrific murder on her hands. A beautiful girl has been found on the banks of the Thames, her naked body hacked in two and drained of blood. Worse still, the postmortem uncovers further mutilations that indicate a sick and dangerous man with a loathing of women is on the loose.
The Unsolved Case of The Black Dahlia
It's not long before the case takes a new twist: this vicious modern-day killing appears to be an almost exact copy of an unsolved murder in Los Angeles from the 1940s, in which a young woman dubbed "The Black Dahlia" by the press is found in a similar state. Indeed, someone is very keen for the likeness to be noticed, sending anonymous letters to both the press and the police drawing attention to the unsolved case.
The latest victim is soon being referred to as "The Red Dahlia", after a widely circulated photograph of her with a red flower in her hair. The days tick by with no leads and no suspects; the trouble is, the police know that if the killer is following the pattern of the 1940s murderer, they must act fast or there will be more deaths to come...
Anna Travis and Jane Tennison
Anna Travis, who readers first met in La Plante's earlier best seller Above Suspicion, makes her second outing in this novel and is shaping up as a worthy successor to La Plante's best known character Jane Tennison, of Prime Suspect fame. She is tough yet compassionate, with a touching tendency to pick the wrong man, as witnessed by her awkwardness around her boss, James Langton, who also makes a welcome return in this novel.
La Plante is as compulsively readable as ever, providing suitably gory details and moving the story along at a cracking pace. A small criticism is that this pace does flag a little after a blistering start: the main crime unfolds at the very beginning of the book, and the second half of the novel deals exclusively with the police's investiagtions into their main suspect, whose story, dramatic though it is, cannot quite match up to the graphic horor of the opening pages. Yet this is a minor quibble, and it is hard to argue with fellow writer Karin Slaughter's assessment that "Lynda La Plante practically invented the thriller".
The Red Dahlia by Lynda La Plante is published in the UK in paperback by Pocket Books (2007), ISBN 978-0-7434-8376-6.
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