Black Tunnel White Magic : A Murder, a Detective's Obsession, and '90s Los Angeles at the Brink

Retired LAPD detective Jackson teams up with true crime author McGough (The Lazarus Files) to recount how Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, spent six years solving the bizarre murder of Ron Baker. The 21-year-old Baker was found dead in a Los Angeles train tunnel on the summer solstice in 1990, his throat slashed with a Marine Corps knife. Almost immediately, Baker's two roommates, Nathan Blalock and Duncan Martinez, became the sole suspects, but the case stalled after Martinez faked his own kidnapping and disappeared for 18 months. Jackson and McGough's account of the investigation, which is dotted with strange red herrings--Baker was interested in Wicca, and his family received cryptic ransom calls--unfolds like a mind-bending prestige TV crime drama, with the details liable to grip readers as tightly as they did the authors. If the final product is occasionally long-winded, and the prose more serviceable than striking, those minor flaws fail to break the story's spell as a stirring testament to Jackson and Garcia's persistence. Readers drawn to complex, slow-burn investigations will be rapt. Photos. Agent: Andrew Blauner, Blauner Books. (Mar.)