 It was first released by Avon as a mass-market paperback original under the title Silent Terror, and has since been republished in the US under Ellroy's original title "Killer on the Road", first as a mass-market paperback in 1990 and later as a trade paperback in 1999.After the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy, written in the third person, "Killer on the Road" returns to the first-person narrative style of Ellroy's first two novels.For the first time in Ellroy's career, however, the story is written from a criminal's point of view.