From the author of Made in America and The Schultz Brothers, Moonlight Jazz is a quiet, eerie tale of old Hollywood, loneliness, and one sleepless man who may have been the last person to see a vanished woman as she truly was.

January 9, 1947. Hollywood is cold after midnight, and the clocks inside Mack's diner do not agree.

Howard Crane is an insomniac cartoonist who has not slept in more than two days, alone in a booth working on another installment of The Dodsons, the syndicated comic strip that made him successful enough to stop enjoying it.

Then a young woman in a black dress sits down across from him. She calls herself Liz. She is funny, curious, restless, and vividly alive in a way Howard no longer is. Over coffee, pie, cigarettes, and late-night jazz, they talk about movie houses, fathers, war, bad love, dead men, and the funny pages?the only part of the newspaper where nobody dies. And when Liz asks Howard to draw her, he does something he has not done in years. He sees someone.

By morning, she is gone. Within days, the whole country will know her by another name: The Black Dahlia.