Killer on the Road

Ellroy’s deep dive into the psyche of a serial killer and “the scariest book I’ve ever read.” (Jonathan Kellerman)

Martin Michael Plunkett is a product of his times—as a child, he possessed a genius intellect, but also a pitiless soul and heart of blackest evil burnished in his adolescence. By the 1960s, Plunkett finds himself in the bay city of San Francisco, amid Charles Manson hysteria, where he indulges in savage and terrible impulses. He is revealed to himself as a pure and perfect murderer. Thus begins a decade of discovery and terror, the coming-of-age of a criminal, pieced together through police reports, media coverage, and confessions.

As Plunkett maneuvers deftly through a seamy world of drugs, flesh, and perversions, the media will call him many things—but Martin Plunkett’s real name is Death. His brilliant, twisted mind is a horrifying place to explore. Plunkett cuts a bloody swath across the land, ingeniously exploiting and feeding upon a society’s obsessions. His madness reflects a nation’s own. The killer is on the road. And there’s nowhere in America to hide.