Long before she was the Black Dahlia, she was an average girl who coughed through Massachusetts winters and dreamily stared at the sky as if it could grant her a special wish. She was always a girl who wanted something more, something bigger, something better.  Elizabeth Short was born in 1924 outside of Boston, the third of five daughters in a house filled with tension and disappointment. Her father’s business, building miniature golf courses, collapsed during the Great Depression. And then one morning, his car was found by a bridge, and the police thought it was suicide: Phoebe Short, Elizabeth’s mother, knew otherwise. What she was left with were five mouths to feed and no money to do it. Elizabeth was a delicate child.  Pale, thin, with a weak immune system that had a broken filter. Every night, she slept propped on pillows, so her inflamed lungs wouldn’t become filled with fluid, cutting off her airways, making it impossible for her to breathe. Her mother religiously rubb...

Hollywood in the 1930s wore sequins on its sleeve and brass knuckles in its pocket. The Great Depression was ravaging America, but the dream factory on the Los Angeles hills churned out shimmer and fable: comedies sharp as broken glass, gangster pictures reeking of cordite and malevolent intent, and platinum-blonde starlets whose screen smiles glowed brighter to conceal fresh bruises underneath. On the outside, it was all champagne sparkle. Underneath, quicksand and velvet ropes. Lawrence, Massachusetts. This was the place that shaped Thelma Todd—a city with its teeth bared, choked with mill smoke, rivers thick with the runoff of exhausted ambition. Thelma was Lawrence’s daughter, the air there heavy as yesterday’s grief, streets pressed flat by relentless poverty and the clatter of textile machines. By the late 1910s, Lawrence was a faded headline: strike city, strike again, bread riots, one grim winter bleeding into the next. Nobody smiled in Lawrence without a good reason and an eye...