It all began in 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her unfaithful husband. She drank. Her son James was ten years old, lived with his father, hated and missed his mother, and even wished her dead. Three months later, she was murdered. The Hilliker Curse is the confession of a hunter, a treatise on guilt, but above all, a cry for help. James Ellroy openly describes his broken childhood, his years as a petty criminal, his life as a writer, his affairs and marriages, his breakdown, and finally the beginning of a relationship with a woman who might be the one he has long sought.