Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective's Obsession, and '90s Los Angeles at the Brink Audiobook

Detective Rick Jackson, a decorated LAPD detective and a key inspiration in the development of Harry Bosch, delivers a shocking and immersive look into the one case he could never let go.

In June 1990, Ronald Baker, a straight-A UCLA student, was found repeatedly stabbed to death in a tunnel near Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his followers once lived. Shortly thereafter, Detective Rick Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, were assigned the case. Yet the facts made no sense. Who would have a motive to kill Ron Baker in such a grisly manner? Was the proximity to the Manson ranch related to the murder? And what about the pentagram pendant Ron wore around his neck?

Jackson and Garcia soon focused their investigation on Baker’s two male roommates, one Black, and one white. What emerges is at once a story of confounding betrayal and cold-hearted intentions, as well as a larger portrait of an embattled Los Angeles, a city in the grip of the Satanic Panic and grappling with questions of racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of Rodney King.

In straightforward, matter-of-fact prose, Rick Jackson, the now-retired police detective who helped inspire Michael Connelly’s beloved Harry Bosch, along with co-writer, Matthew McGough, take us through the events as he and his partner experienced them, piecing together the truth with each emerging clue. Black Tunnel White Magic is the true story of a murder in cold blood, deception and betrayal, and a city at the brink, set forth by the only man who could tell it.

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""There's always one case that haunts homicide detectives and never goes away . . . Rick Jackson re-creates the case that still keeps him awake at night -- and then detail by painstaking detail not only immerses the reader in an investigation that finds justice for a murdered college student, but also shows how getting haunted and staying haunted is what turns down-and-dirty police work into a transcendent moral cause.  We all hope that the moral arc of the universe really does bend towards justice.  In Black Tunnel, White Magic, we come face-to-face with the kind of elbow grease and obsession necessary to make that happen."—Tom Junod, senior writer, ESPN"

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