The Empty Glass

James Ellroy fans will relish Baker’s impressive first novel, a dark paranoid thriller. On August 5, 1962, Ben Fitzgerald, an L.A. deputy coroner specializing in suicides, answers a summons to go to the modest Brentwood home of Marilyn Monroe. His colleagues and her friends are keen to classify the movie star’s death as a suicide, but Fitzgerald has his doubts, which only intensify after he stumbles across Monroe’s diary, loaded with cryptic references to “the General” and Cuba. The possible suspects in a potential murder case won’t surprise those versed in the rampant speculation surrounding Monroe’s death, but barbed prose makes a familiar story fresh, as does the effective use of flashbacks and flash-forwards, starting with Fitzgerald’s account of his shooting of a police captain who tried to get him to swallow a fatal dose of pills. Fluent in the noir idiom, Baker, Condé Nast Traveler’s executive editor, maintains the depressing atmospherics throughout. Agent: Richard Pine, Inkwell Management. (July)