Moonlight Jazz

January 9, 1947. Hollywood is cold after midnight, and the clocks inside Mack's diner do not agree. Howard Crane, an insomniac cartoonist who has not slept in more than two days, is alone in a booth working on another installment of The Dodsons, the syndicated comic strip that made him equally successful and hollow. Then a young woman in a black dress sits down across from him. She calls herself Liz. She is funny, curious, playful, vibrant, and far more awake to the world than Howard is. Over coffee, pie, cigarettes, and late-night jazz, they talk about movie houses, fathers, war, dead men, bad love, and the funny pages, the only part of the newspaper where nobody dies. When Liz asks Howard to draw her, he does something he has not done in years. He sees someone. By morning, she will be gone. Within days, the whole country will know her by another name: The Black Dahlia. From the author of Made in America and The Schultz Brothers: An American Crime Saga, Moonlight Jazz is a quiet, eerie tale of old Hollywood, loneliness, and one sleepless man who may have been the last person to see a vanished woman as she truly was.