Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin and filth of her apartment was a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. Inside was a lost world that centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-the-heel section of Hollywood: 7406 Franklin Avenue, a combination salon-hotbed-living end where writers and artists mixed with movie stars, rock ’n’ rollers and drug trash. 7406 Franklin Avenue was the making of one great American writer: Joan Didion. It also was the breaking and then the remaking --- and thus the true making --- of another great American writer: Eve Babitz. Didion and Babitz formed a complicated alliance, a friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity. Didion, in spite of her confessional style, is so little known or understood. She’s remained opaque, elusive. Until now.

Death sets the plot of DARK ROOMS in motion: the murder of 16-year-old Nica Baker. The crime is quickly solved --- a lonely classmate, unrequited love, a suicide note confession --- but memory and instinct won’t allow Nica’s older sister, Grace, to accept the case as closed. Dropping out of college and living at home, working at the moneyed and progressive private high school from which she recently graduated, Grace becomes increasingly obsessed with identifying and punishing the real killer.