In March, while I should’ve still been promoting my first novel, Arroyo—which somehow made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list for seven weeks, scooped up an award, and, most importantly, made people curious if their dog was clairvoyant or their favorite bridge alive—I opted to confront my dissatisfying past. Or, to articulate it another way, I rewrote my 2012 book about a freaky Southern California murder triangle into a more suspenseful, true-crime-y tale. Much to my relief, The Darkest Glare: A True Story of Murder, Blackmail and Real Estate Greed in 1979 Los Angeles, was both critically and commercially well-received. On the literary hustings, I penned essays about it; one was for CrimeReads (about how serial killers of the seventies adopted local freeways and their cars as bloody accomplices) and another about my unintended  voyage into this genre. Of all the critiques of the book, the LA Review of Book’s stands out for its insight. I’m also pretty dang fond of the book trailer.

In May, the culture site SHOUTOUT LA ran a feature about why I became a writer, which allowed me to dredge up my own personal Independence Day (think screaming match with a parent) and to get photographed with my puppy and Stratocaster in my beloved horse head.

I checked off a box in June that’d been empty since I was a teenager dreaming of writing for Rolling Stone magazine. I contributed my inaugural piece of music criticism in my admittedly fanboy-ish essay about one of my desert-island bands: Squeeze. The breezy article, entitled “My Favorite Place,” was included in the anthology Go Further: More Appreciations of Power Power. If you think you know this superb group from 80s radio hits like “Tempted” and “Black Coffee in Bed,” you need a deep dive into the genius of Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford. You’ll come away humming, as well as cheesed off that Donovan is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Squeeze on the outside looking in. 

Speaking of essays, the one exponentially more important than any of the above remains my long-time-in-coming piece about a high-fly baseball that whacked me in the nose as a little boy, and then brought the Divine into my room. Limited human that I am, I coined it The Man in the Light. If it’s the last thing you ever read from me, let this be it, and then Let It Be.

I wrapped up the screwed up year by optioning the book I left daily journalism to write, a biography of my maternal uncle called Strange As It Seems: the Impossible Life of Gordon Zahler, to the talented, energetic folks at Mercury Media. The hope, with this and some of my other books, is to turn them into a streaming series. Cuz, what’s life on this topsy turvy third rock from the sun, without a screen?

The post Chip’s Year in Writing & Creating appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

Forty minutes later, I lingered near one of the hospital’s side entrances, unable to spot any fellow journalists milling around. So, I popped open the door, figuring they might be inside. That’s when a tubby police officer whipped around the corner, telling me in an angry whisper that the gunman who’d already shot three doctors — one with a .38-caliber slug to the head — was holding two people hostage just around the bend. “Get down and go!” he said, his hand gripping a revolver.

I left, lucky only to have been chastised, and discovered the media scrum in an adjacent parking lot. It was now your basic hurry-up-and-wait while authorities tried to end the standoff with the gunman, a disgruntled patient who lived on Skid Row. They hauled him off in a squad car after several hours, and as I angled for a view of his face, an overly aggressive TV cameraman whacked me in the back of the head with his lens. But I still noticed the suspect resembled Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” serial killer who had terrorized Los Angeles the previous decade.

By nightfall, with our story for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune in editing, I needed to decompress. I ripped off my nicotine patch and bought the last pack of cigarettes I’d ever smoke.

The O. J. Simpson murders would be the next crime story I’d write about, if tangentially, for the Los Angeles Times and its rival, the Los Angeles Daily News. Full-time crime reporters, as I learned, were the characters in the newsroom, often cynical, swashbuckling, and as brash as the cops with whom they interacted. I didn’t run in that herd.

It wasn’t until one day in 1998, strolling along Hollywood Boulevard, that I got stopped on the sidewalk by a guy named Jerry Schneiderman who had been both a source for stories and a bit of a fabulist.

“Did you know,” he said, “that I once had a double murderer chasing me?”

He claimed the ordeal ruined the “old” him, gutting his first marriage and leaving him forever mistrustful of strangers.

Yeah, right, I said, figuring he was either pulling my chain, as he was apt to do, or exaggerating something unverifiable.

Never was I more wrong.

Schneiderman had been a nerdy 27-year-old space-planning prodigy when his partner, a suave, charismatic fellow 12 years his senior, persuaded him into something of a real estate get-rich-quick scheme: adding construction services to their otherwise white-collar business sketching interior blueprints for Los Angeles companies big and small. In need of an experienced foreman — and a California contractor’s license — they hired a quiet, windburned applicant, sight unseen. What Schneiderman didn’t know was that both his colleagues bore secrets, one more diabolical than the other. From the ashes of financial misconduct and palace intrigue soon emerged a sequence of events out of an Elmore Leonard novel.

Then again, life in 1979 Los Angeles made for plenty of deadbolted doors and just as much paranoia. Murder rates were spiking. “White flight” was growing, as were gated communities and racial tensions between people of color and the increasingly militarized LAPD. Worse, overlapping serial killers (like “The Hillside Strangler” and “The Freeway Killer”) seemed to prowl at their leisure.

Beyond the criminality, Southern California exuded this seething aura, just like the rest of a demoralized post-Vietnam, post-Watergate United States, except amid palm trees and famous boulevards. The anchor’s rant in Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant Network, where he encouraged viewers to scream that they were “mad as hell,” felt less Hollywood drama than modern documentary. There was a noir quality to our existence that rendered even our beloved La Brea Tar Pits a shadowy expanse you didn’t want to hang around at night. A 17-year-old at the time, what I remember now are the gloomy skies and sullen adults.

Years later, I realized that Schneiderman only had a keyhole-wide understanding of the darkness that had swirled around him. For instance, he had little understanding that his partner’s execution with a powerful World War II–era rifle represented the opening salvo in a boutique murder-for-profit corporation. The ringleader of it was Howard Garrett, their vulture-faced foreman who’d decided to toss caution to the wind by cashing in on other people’s demises. In a tense meeting where Garrett blackmailed Schneiderman, threatening him and his family with their own murder contracts, Garrett warned Schneiderman that he had killed before “and gotten away with it.” He wasn’t lying.

The web of would-be assassins that ensnared Schneiderman included a bantam-sized gunman with a deadeye aim, a transgender thief, and a bisexual white supremacist crook with a grain of conscience.

But I never could’ve unearthed a drop of this 20-year-old saga without my journalism background. As such, I spent hours in the Hall of Records’s dungeon-esque basement in downtown Los Angeles, examining court filings, even though many were missing or stolen. I interviewed dozens of people swept up in Garrett’s months-long reign of terror, among them former LAPD homicide detectives who, like Schneiderman, couldn’t forget Garrett. Eventually, I connected with the lead prosecutor, who offered public documents that confirmed the outlines of this weirder-than-fiction tale.

One salacious document showed that between the time when Schneiderman’s business partner was murdered and Garrett was dramatically arrested he worked on a freelance construction job at the offices of the California Association of Realtors, a trade group promoting integrity in the real estate business.

All of this digging kept me at a comfortable distance from the actual villains involved. I still craved to learn more, and with Garrett long dead, there was only one person who knew the truth about him: the triggerman who’d fired the fateful bullet into the head of Schneiderman’s feather-haired partner, Richard Kasparov.

Johnny Williams was many things: a bushy-haired man who had already admitted to killing multiple people before this, an industrious criminal alchemist, and the victim of a traumatic brain injury from tumbling out of a moving car. That pivotal event had demented him from a kid with a soaring IQ into a sociopath.

To hear him out, I typed up a letter requesting an interview, and then, probably a dozen times, stuck it in my mailbox only to retract it moments later. Williams had testified under oath, to a stupefied courtroom, that killing to him was no big deal. Years later, the parole board at Corcoran State Prison in Central California repeatedly denied his release, deeming him an ongoing threat to society.

What if my nosy questions about what landed him behind bars incensed him and he was subsequently freed? Even the internet of the early aughts made it simple to locate someone’s address. Would he pop up outside my window with a big gun, just as he had with Schneiderman’s partner, for one last slaughter? What about my family? Were Williams’s sinister memories worth it?

That one-page letter collected dust in my file cabinet for two years as I hemmed and hawed, weighing the risk, when I heard that Williams died behind bars.

Then I wrote The Darkest Glare, a nonfiction account that tried to stitch all the craziness together into a single book. I hope I did it justice without Williams.

I was confident I could handle not only the Kafkaesque twists of Schneiderman’s ordeal but also the prologue of it — the PTSD, the legal and emotional dominoes that cascaded afterward, the questions about hidden identities behind the smiles of Los Angeles contractors. And that’s all because a distracted city editor shooed me out the door to cover that hospital shooting. The best story is the one you never set out to write.

The post “The Accidental True Crime Writer” – my Los Angeles Review of Books essay appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

We had the good fortune of connecting with Chip Jacobs and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Chip, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
In fall 1982, at parents’ night at my college fraternity, I dropped a bomb on my father, telling him that I was switching my major from business administration to journalism. He’d been a child of the Great Depression, having me in his mid-forties, and ever since disdained newspaper reporters as sort of bottom-scrapers who recorded the day’s big events rather than contributing to society writ large. The argument that erupted between us that evening felt like the climax of a John Hughes coming-of-age movie. Suddenly, a 100+ people listening to a speaker up front swiveled their heads to the back of the meeting hall to hear me scream that this was MY damn life, not his to plot out; that my heart would never be in a soulless corporate job, let alone the slow-suicide of working in family real estate business, however much it’d paid my way. We were a couple of distant planets afterwards, him furious, me terrified about the ramifications of my ill-timed declaration of independence. Somehow, we remained on speaking terms.

By 1990, after flirting with the idea of a career as CIA analyst (you know, to save the world from nuclear apocalypse), I secured my first reporting job at the Los Angeles Business Journal. Never was I happier. It wed my natural, admittedly annoying curiosity with a genuine love of writing, filling me with pride and a hunger to improve every day. Seven years, and a bunch of newspaper posts later, I took another plunge you could either term courageous or self-sabotaging. On a decided roll, with the Los Angeles Times interested in hiring me after a string of front-page exposes, I up and quit its fierce rival, the Los Angeles Daily News, to pen my first book, Strange As It Seems. My editor and others begged me not to, that I was making a terrible mistake, but hazy voices seemed to be calling me. My mother’s side of the family, I knew by then, was chalked with creatives. There was that famous European dancer, a Broadway star, Hollywood directors and musicians; heck, author Irving Stone was a distant cousin.

Still, in leaving a job I adored for this more solitary pursuit, I frequently second guessed my decision to walk away from the never-dull newsroom. When a  preliminary book deal with St. Martin’s Press fizzled, it seemed as though I’d magically converted that potential folks told me I had into smoking ruin. My second book about the “Great” L.A. smog crisis garnered critical acclaim, though releasing it at the onset of the “Great Recession” was a recipe for commercial frustration. I plowed ahead after Smogtown anyway, reminding myself about all those moody writers sustaining themselves on little more than self-belief while peers racked up champagne successes. In reporting, I always felt luck sided with me. In the literary universe subject to fads and social changes, it was swamp-plodding. One day, when I was actively considering returning to journalism, an epiphany floated down on me. I was picking book subjects that in a fashion picked me based on my childhood, my outrage as the world as it was, or on topics that’d always secretly fascinated me. My mom, who passed on in 2008, just as my biography about her larger-than-life brother was slated to appear, had always encouraged me to lean into my artistic ancestry. Sometimes I loved her for that, though other times I resented it for where it lead me

I gulped reliving those memories when Arroyo, my debut novel about Progressive-Age Pasadena and its mysterious Colorado Street Bridge came out, reaching, to my surprise, the L.A. Times bestseller list and becoming a local hit. As I reflected on my serpentine journey to that pre-pandemic jubilation, I prayed that the father who wanted me to grip a briefcase instead of banging away on a keyboard was peering down from the afterlife. Hopefully, he appreciated that our Reagan-era hollering match funneled me into the Chip I had no choice in becoming.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
When I was a kid in the foothills of Pasadena, I had this older, neighborhood pal blessed with the innate ability to sketch. Football players; cats dressed up like NHL players; smoggy landscapes. Gerald just had the gift. I tried copying him, and quickly realized I was no Gerald, for I topped out artistically with stick figures. Reading was where I found my organic meter: ”The Three Musketeers,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “Lord of the Rings” transported to me to the most fanciful spot in the universe: between my own ears.

By college, the verdict was in. I should stay a million miles away from advanced mathematics (and drawing for that matter) and apply myself in any field where the ability to tell stories was at a premium. And who was I to argue with a metaphorical jury? The first time I saw my byline was in a political column at my college newspaper, The Daily Trojan. I grabbed every copy I could find, feeling the rock star when classmates gave me the occasional attaboy. My roommate started calling me “Scoop.” I was giddy. And just as naive.

Thousands of newspaper articles later, on subjects ranging from the genesis of the Original Tommy’s hamburger empire to an investigative take-out about a genius environmental businesswoman who ran with shadowy CIA types, I know I stayed in the profession I was supposed to, even if often paid like crap and some of my subjects pined to get me fired. Here’s the thing: every word one writes is one’s own mirror on the world—a reflection of not just dry facts and curated quotes but the writer’s life experiences. My articles were also my Killroy: proof that I was here. They painted heroes, identified villains, and, I hope, gave folks blue about their lives an occaionsal chance to laugh. Only this Chip would be weird enough to jump at the opportunity to write about the joys of dumpster diving. All those years removed from USC, I wouldn’t have it any other way! Journalism for me was less an occupation and more a crusade. From my first reading of All the President’s Men, I was hooked. Woodward and Bernstein became my Lennon and McCartney.

Transitioning to being an author prone to skipping around in different genres requires many of the same traits: confidence, creativity, a bit of insanity, and a lot of sheer “want-to.” Many assume being an artist is about creating something thought-provoking that you gawk at in art galleries or murmur about on in view of catwalk or book signings. After many years, I view it differently. I believe it’s about challenging oneself to stretch higher than ever imagined, and knowing the result is for both other people’s benefit as well as leaving footprints that our souls recognize as evidence of right-brained free will.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
It’s an autumn Friday night, and we’ve been starving ourselves for a gluttonous weekend. Dinner has to be at Park’s (Korean) BBQ, on Vermont Avenue in mid city LA. Come for the grilled meats, stay for the kimchi and pork belly. Did I mention beer was created thousands of years ago specifically for this salty fare?

The following morning is no time for slacking or calorie counting. It’s breakfast at South Pasadena’s retro-roofed Shakers, crispy hash brown, please, and then a drive down the Harbor Freeway to the gray lady — the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — to watch my beloved USC Trojans play on that immaculate green turf, as I’ve been doing since I was a child barely able to see anything. Since man doesn’t live on Coliseum dogs alone, it’s Langer’s No. 19 pastrami for a post-game meal. Back home, we fall into the kind of slumbers reserved for pythons after consuming a gazelle.

Sunday, we eat lighter, maybe something from a San Gabriel Valley farmer’s market. Next, my guest allows me to give them a tour of my hometown, just like my protagonist Nick Chance in my novel Arroyo. We drive up into the San Gabriel Mountains to see where Thaddeus Lowe’s once world-famous electric railway ran, then walk off some fat by hiking south from the Rose Bowl to where dreamy Busch Gardens and exotic Cawston Ostrich Fam used to sit. Since I can only describe its paintings so well, we venture into the Norton Simon museum for glimpses of the world’s most prize art, from Picasso to you name it . After that, we traipse around Caltech’s shady campus, home of eggheads, Nobel prize winners, and underrated architecture. That night, we’re back on the road, grabbing Ethiopian food (literally with our fingers) at Massob, capped by an intimate show at The Mint LA club. If we’re lucky, we’ll see an enormous talent, like Squeeze’s Glenn Tilbrook, blow the doors off the place. If not, we’ll see a Donovan impersonator (kidding).

Come Monday, we get tacos to go from Lupita’s, a strip-mal eatery close to a dog-washing shop, and eat lunch on one of those flyover benches carved inside the historic, Arroyo-Seco-spanning Colorado Street Bridge. The mountain views there are heavenly. Given our fare over the last three days, we might just ascend up those Pearly Gates, grateful to have been alive and hopeful for a return.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’d be nowhere, obviously, without the undying belief of my family, friends, work colleagues, plus the tail-wagging support of the mutts I’ve loved. When your dog stares you in the eye, telegraphing a message that he/she knows you can do better than you are, you disregard at your own peril.

High school — in my case, Flintridge Preparatory School just about JPL in La Canada-Flintridge — was where I first discovered my footing for the future. Our history teacher there, John Hamilton, was a brilliant communicator who knew how to breath the past back to life for  us bunch of distracted, girl-crazy boys. How? He framed personalities, conflicts, and giant stakes into a narrative that made you hang on his every word. To him, manifest destiny wasn’t only an expression of America’s westward pioneers. It was what lived in each one of us to do whatever it took to extract what we had to offer the world, or die trying. My senior year English teacher, Cheryl Ginzton, was another shaper of me. I still remember vigorously arguing with her about Hamlet’s sanity, and her later urging me to be a writer who followed his curiosity wherever it transported him. Though Mr. Hamilton is no longer with us, my English teacher is. I know that because when I did a book reading at the Pasadena Central Library, she showed up with a copy. Sure, she dozed off while I was reading from my novel, but I was humbled she made it. Plus I will parlay the scene, names changed of course, in a future book fueled by my unquenchable, sometimes pathological need to tell stories.

The contents of this post are nearly identical to the article that ran in Shoutout LA

The post Meet Chip Jacobs: Author, journalist, dog-enthusiast, spiritual optimist appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

To this day, the expressions remain amber in memory: the knotted foreheads of Pennsylvanians near the meltdown at the Three-Mile Island nuclear-power plant; Jimmy Carter’s clenched grin realizing circumstance would relegate him to a one-termer. How a January that began hopefully with Terry Bradshaw’s aw-shucks glee after winning a Super Bowl in Miami metastasized in November into rage and disbelief at the righteous scowl of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who proclaimed “Death to America” as his followers took U.S. embassy workers hostage in Tehran.

For me, an ever-curious seventeen-year-old in the foothills of Pasadena, California, those flickering images, as well as other dismaying ones — the victims of crisscrossing serial killers, dying steel towns, Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan — seeded doubts about pretty much everything concerning the future. It was a kind of “Deer Hunter” state of mind.

So, blessed be for those unleashed Les Pauls, for thumping bass riffs, for singers going where the suited adults wouldn’t. The chrome housing of my pride-and-joy Sony stereo rarely grew cold, not as I gorged on a feast of eclectic, envelope-stretching music that painted my world the vivid colors seemingly bled out of the real one. Classic albums, melodic punk, dangerous New Wave: if you needed pretext for an album party, there was always cellophane to unwrap.

Blue-blood acts I adored — Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd — were proving they weren’t longhaired dinosaurs ducking comets named Deborah Harry, Joe Strummer, Robin Zander or David Byrne. And just as Blue Oyster Cult sang about how nature continually revealed the foolishness of man, 1979 also sped the destruction of the glittery dance ball born from Barry Gibb falsettos, at least as evinced by the anarchy of the “Anti-Disco” night at Chicago’s Comiskey Stadium after a White Sox game.

Why am I effusing about music created when Beyonce wasn’t even born, churned out by musicians with the faint ring of a dive-bar Throwback Thursday trivia contest?

In March of that year, on a rainy evening several freeways away from my bedroom poster of Jimmy Page in his white, dragon pants, a trio of wannabe assassins crouched on the deck of a suburban house in the San Fernando Valley, “America’s Suburb:” The killing in their sights would serve multiple purposes: as trance-inducing revenge for its mastermind, and as the inauguration of his murder-for-profit ring targeting real estate executives who squirreled hefty sums of cash at home.

Though I wouldn’t piece together this entire, bizarre story until 40-plusyears later, well after I junked my corduroys and mix-tape cassettes, it got me wondering. How would the saga of an only-in-LA business partnership — devolving as it did into treachery, gore, and criminal absurdity — sound if it was told by radio-blared songs rather than the pages of the true-crime book I wrote?

My parameter: do it with through ten works released in ’79, narrowing them to either top-sellers listed by Billboard magazine or ones praised by Rolling Stone and others. My reasoning: music is a sonic reverberation on its times, often depicting the era’s gestalt better us later moored to a keyboard.

***

Once upon a time, there was a young space planner (a.k.a. interior architect) who was brilliant and nerdy. He also wrestled with the labels the city slapped on him, sometimes unsure which way was up. Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” must’ve been his jam.

To compensate for his inexperience, the space planner hired a suave, older associate to be the public face of their upstart firm, Space Matters. This man, from a wealthy West L.A. family that’d yoked high expectations on him, was equally ambitious but also more risk-taking. He sweet-talked his partner into adding hard-hat construction services to their otherwise white-collar enterprise.

“Stagflation” economy” and all, Space Matters killed it at first, landing deals from grand dame Wilshire Boulevard to the futuristic westside. Anyone been to Tom Petty’s “Century City?” They sold to insurance companies and stuffy banks, pop-psychology groups advocating nudity, weed, and primal screaming, as well as a sixties’ counterculture figure turned leasing tycoon. For strange bedfellow colleagues working out of an old mansion near L.A.’s posh “Miracle Mile,” they rolled like they were, in Police vernacular, “Walking on the Moon.”

Voyages, however, are propelled by trust and expertise, not deception camouflaged by toothy smiles. The very partner the young space planner recruited had actually cheated him out of tens of thousands of dollars, jeopardizing everything they’d built. At an ambush meeting at the glitzy Polo Lounge, the blow-dried embezzler was booted out of the promising firm. Let Joe Jackson explain how flimflams are devised. “I’m The Man.”

If this were the old Dick Clark game show, “The $20,000 Pyramid,” the grand-prize question would be why such a talented, charismatic person needed to resort to such knife-in-the-back trickery? The regrettable answer: uncontainable demons, self-shame, and, beneath the surface, paranoia that his wife, a spunky, ravishing woman much his junior, needed to be indulged, lest he lose her. She was, more or less, his “My Sharona,” as presented by The Knack.

The problem with cheaters is that they often cheat multiple suckers, with some less willing than others to answer with a lawsuit or eternal disgust. A monster, who hide behind the legitimacy of his nine-to-five, Joe Sixpack persona, put a contract out on the trickster as proof. When the first assassin he hired to take care of the matter developed cold feet and fled up north, he found himself on the execution list, becoming a “Renegade,” albeit not how Styx imagined.

Even with blinking lights he was being hunted, the older space planner — a man with two daughters, an estranged spouse still open to reconciliation, and many others who loved him — remained in LA when he should’ve booked a flight on the Concord to a remote European village. To squish down his inner torment, he hooked up that stormy night with a former secretary and rolled himself a doobie, felling “Comfortably Numb.” He just could’ve used a wall more fortified than Pink Floyd’s.

The mastermind pounced on his target’s lethargy, driving his El Camino across at least four freeways with his bottom-scraping, gaffe-prone toadies. The intent was bloodier than AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” Job done, dozens of Angelenos connected to a bullet-pierced window were petrified of opening their curtain — or seeing that shark-like Chevy round their block. They knew, like Elvis Costello knew, that “Accidents Will Happen.” They just didn’t understand who picked the victims.

Nobody had more reasons to keep looking over his shoulder than our nerdy space planner. For months, he “lived” in disguise, under occasional protection of an-ex Israeli mercenary, surviving a botched showdown at the creepy La Brea Tar Pits. It’d take him decades before he could live as blithely as the good timer in Squeeze’s “Cool for Cats.”

And only then with a raging mistrust of the true L.A. behind its sunny mask.

To hear the Spotify playlist from this essay, click here! This essay was first published on Medium here.

The post 1979 L.A. True Crime in Song appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

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The post My true-crime book, “The Darkest Glare,” comes out on March 9. In that spirit, I’m listing — cuz everyone adores lists as much as parfaits and stretchy pants — my favorite works in the genre. appeared first on Chip Jacobs .

—(An) engrossingly bizarre tale of a murder plot within Los Aneles real estate circles…An entertaining true-crime period piece built around a chillingly odd sociopathic villain.”—Kirkus Review

—(An) entertaining…true crime narrative…both horrifying and hilarious…Though undoubtedly odd, this (story) still manages to fascinate.” — Publishers Weekly 

—”If you’re a fan of true crime and L.A. noir, this one’s for you.”—Southern California News Group 

—”If all the praise is to be believed, the author of the L.A. Times bestseller Arroyo— Jacobs’ first crack at historical fiction after producing an impressive array of non-fiction works — has another hit on his hands in the…soon-to-be-released The Darkest Glare.”—Pasadena Now

— “Jacobs’ chops are on brilliant display in The Darkest Glare, a delightfully off-kilter true-crime tale. The prose is intimate, darkly funny, and crisp as he follows. Jacobs’ ear for a good story is pitch perfect.” — Ron Franscell, bestselling author of The Darkest Night

— “In Chip Jacobs true-crime, The Darkest Glare we are whisked back to LA’s Kodachrome world of the Seventies…This is not just another Hollywood Whodunit. In the end we find it is really about one man’s search and struggle to find his own…redemption. Well written and highly recommended.” – Steve Hodel, bestselling author, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder

— “A terrific book – I couldn’t put it down! — Stephen Jay Schwartz,  bestselling author of Boulevard

— “Chip Jacobs uses his boundless reporter’s energy and well-honed sense of Southern California to tell a gripping tale…It’s reassuring to see the right writer was paying attention.” – David Willman, Los Angeles Times Pulitzer winning investigative reporter and author of The Mirage Man: Bruce Irvins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America’s Rush to War

On March 10, I’ll be kicking off the book with bestselling true-crime author Ron Franscell on a Vroman’s Bookstore virtual event. 

The post First Reviews on my True Crime Book, “The Darkest Glare” appeared first on Chip Jacobs .