21, had an argument with her boyfriend Monday night and considered canceling her trip to see him. A friend drove her to the airport, and she decided at the last moment not to take the flight. Her mother didn't know whether Julie was aboard until she heard from her daughter two hours later, according to The Associated Press.Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Jonathan Kellerman is the author of the Alex Delaware novels. He named a top ten list of LA noir novels for the Guardian.

Two books on his list:

The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy

Thirty years on, James Ellroy's early books remain fresh: he was writing about the monstrous psychopaths who later became familiarised as serial killers back when no else could even imagine people like that existed. (I'll take some partial credit here: my fourth novel, The Butcher's Theatre, covered the same grisly ground because my background in psychology led me to explore the darkest aspects of human behaviour. I set the book in Jerusalem, but there are some LA scenes. Butcher was written in 1985; Ellroy and I were hanging out regularly