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WORK TITLE: Black Tunnel, White Magic
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Police detective. Los Angeles Police Department, police officer and detective, c. 1979-2013; consultant and technical advisor for crime fiction writers and numerous television shows and movies.
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Rick Jackson was a thirty-four-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department before retiring in 2013. He was a homicide detective and was especially well known for working on cold cases, and he was the inspiration for Michael Connelly’s fictional detective Harry Bosch. Even before retiring, Jackson also worked as a consultant and technical advisor for television shows, movies, and authors. One of those was Connelly, who has worked with Jackson for more than fifteen years.
In 2025, Jackson and investigative journalist Matthew McGough collaborated on Jackson’s debut book, Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, A Detective’s Obsession, and ’90s Los Angeles at the Brink. This is the account of a bizarre murder that took place in 1990 and the investigation that followed. A UCLA student was stabbed in a train tunnel, and some people, including Jackson, initially thought the case might have connections to devil worship, but then he and his partner Frank Garcia started focusing on the victim’s roommates. That part of the case was even more outlandish, but eventually both roommates were convicted. Jackson and McGough describe how the investigation progressed and also how it intersected with issues of policing and race (one roommate was white, the other Black, the Rodney King beating took place while the investigation was ongoing). Jackson also uses the book to look back on the case, particularly since the white roommate was eventually granted clemency, while the Black roommate remains in prison.
“Readers drawn to complex, slow-burn investigations will be rapt,” wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. A contributor in Kirkus Reviews called the book a “satisfyingly intricate journey into the policing of urban violence.” They praised the book for being both “exhaustive” and allowing the reader to “follow a complicated homicide investigation.” David Pitt, in Booklist, was even more enthusiastic, describing the book as a “first-rate work of true crime.” He found the case “utterly compelling.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February, 2025, David Pitt, review of Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective’s Obsession, and ’90s Los Angeles at the Brink, pp. 3+.
Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2025, review of Black Tunnel White Magic.
Publishers Weekly, January 27, 2025, review of Black Tunnel White Magic, p. 72.
Rick Jackson had a 34-year career with the Los Angeles Police Department, before retiring in 2013. He is a known homicide expert, as well as a highly-regarded detective with extensive expertise and success in the field of “cold case” homicides. Rick has been a consultant and technical advisor for New York Times #1 bestselling crime fiction author Michael Connelly. This ongoing 16-year relationship has included all of Connelly’s novels, the “Bosch” television series, and numerous other film and TV scripts.
Jackson, Rick BLACK TUNNEL WHITE MAGIC Mulholland Books/Little, Brown (NonFiction None) $35.00 3, 4 ISBN: 9780316365789
True-crime memoir that minutely details the labyrinthine investigation of a brutal murder.
Retired Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective Jackson (writing with McGough) surveys his 34-year tenure via the long road to justice in the 1990 stabbing of UCLA student Ron Baker in a train tunnel near Chatsworth Park. Given the era's suspicions of occult conspiracies, investigators first pursued "a possible 'devil worship satanic connection.'" Yet Jackson's suspicions soon fell on Ron's roommates, Duncan and Nathan, white and Black military veterans, respectively; despite their affability, once Duncan fails his polygraph, "the evidence [soon] stubbornly suggested that Duncan and Nathan had had a hand in Ron's killing, whether or not it made sense." Duncan, a committed fabulist, faked his own kidnapping and disappeared, only to be later apprehended for passport fraud; he agreed to record Nathan admitting to their planning of the killing as a faux kidnap for ransom, an "outlandish motive." This convoluted investigation plays out against the backdrop of the Rodney King beating and O.J. Simpson's trial: "In the span of just a few years, Los Angeles and its criminal justice system had become ground zero for the country's racial divisions." Regarding Duncan's and Nathan's divergent fates, Jackson ruefully observes, "Little did we imagine at the time how perceptions about race would enter the equation later." After five years, both were convicted at trial and "thus deserved the same sentence: life without any possibility of parole." Yet 25 years later, Duncan successfully received clemency while Nathan has not, deepening the appearance of structural racial bias in this bizarre case. Interviews are represented at length, which seems exhaustive, yet it allows the reader to follow a complicated homicide investigation with only senselessness at its heart.
Satisfyingly intricate journey into the policing of urban violence.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Jackson, Rick: BLACK TUNNEL WHITE MAGIC." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828785242/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=634dd5bb. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.
Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective's Obsession, and '90s Los Angeles at the Brink. By Rick Jackson and Matthew McGough. Mar. 2025. 528p. Little, Brown/Mulholland, $35 (9780316365789). 364.
June 1990. A UCLA student is stabbed to death; his body is found in a tunnel near the infamous Spahn Ranch, where Charles Manson and his "family" lived in the 1960s. Rick Jackson and his partner led the investigation, but this was no straightforward murder case. Was the Spahn Ranch relevant? Why was the victim wearing a magical symbol? Who had a motive to kill this seemingly fine, upstanding citizen? This true-crime tale, written by detective Jackson and investigative detective McGough, is the kind of book descriptors like "searing," "intense," and "haunting" were custom-made for. The case itself is utterly compelling--a murder with potentially satanic overtones, committed in the midst of the "satanic panic" of the 1980s and '90s--and the writing is exquisite, keeping the reader glued to the page. The book comes highly recommended with a foreword by renowned crime fiction writer Michael Connelly, who's known Jackson for many years (the detective was part of the inspiration for Connelly's protagonist Harry Bosch), and if you can't trust Connelly, who can you trust? This is a first-rate work of true crime. --David Pitt
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Pitt, David. "Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective's Obsession, and '90s Los Angeles at the Brink." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 11-12, Feb. 2025, pp. 3+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A846924536/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0768bf43. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.
Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective's Obsession, and '90s Los Angeles at the Brink
Rick Jackson and Matthew McGough. Mulholland, $32.50 (528p)
ISBN 978-0-316-36578-9
Retired LAPD detective Jackson teams up with true crime author McGough (The Lazarus Files) to recount how Jackson and his partner, Frank Garcia, spent six years solving the bizarre murder of Ron Baker. The 21-year-old Baker was found dead in a Los Angeles train tunnel on the summer solstice in 1990, his throat slashed with a Marine Corps knife. Almost immediately, Baker's two roommates, Nathan Blalock and Duncan Martinez, became the sole suspects, but the case stalled after Martinez faked his own kidnapping and disappeared for 18 months. Jackson and McGough's account of the investigation, which isdotted with strange red herrings--Baker was interested in Wicca, and his familyreceived cryptic ransom calls--unfolds like a mind-bending prestige TV crime drama, with the details liable to grip readers as tightly as they did the authors. If the final product is occasionally long-winded, and the prose more serviceable than striking, those minor flaws fail to break the story's spell as a stirring testament to Jackson and Garcia's persistence. Readers drawn to complex, slow-burn investigations will be rapt. Photos. Agent: Andrew Blauner, Blauner Books. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective's Obsession, and '90s Los Angeles at the Brink." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 4, 27 Jan. 2025, p. 72. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300280/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cab35d64. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025.