Malice and mayhem simmer beneath the surface of one of America's favorite vacation areas.

David L. Ulin is book critic of the Los Angeles Times. From 2005 to 2010, he was the paper's book editor. He is the author of The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, and the editor of Another City: Writing from Los Angeles and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a 2002 California Book Award. He has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, and National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He teaches in the low residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Riverside's Palm Desert Graduate Center, and was a visiting professor in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California, Irvine in the spring of 2010. His new book, The Lost Art of Reading, is due out in November.