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White Jazz
White Jazz
Oct 18, 2024 12:24 PM

Author:James Ellroy

White Jazz

Best-selling crime fiction author James Ellroy returns with the fourth in his LA Quartet.

Los Angeles, 1958: a city on the make. A boom town at the edge of a new era ripe for plunder.

Lieutenant Dave Klein: in turn a lawyer, bagman, slum landlord, mob killer. Klein stands at the centre of a complex web of plots where violence and death will intersect. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer--a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire.

Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time...

Reviews

A vivid, enthralling read... James Ellroy is the outstanding American crime writer of his generation

—— Independent

Recent novels by the likes of Carl Hiassen, Andrew Vachss and George V Higgins have at best been treading water. James Ellroy may be the exception. He seems in less danger of burnout than of going supernova

—— New Statesman and Society

One of the great American writers of our time

—— Los Angeles Times Book Review

White Jazz makes previous detective fiction read like Dr. Seuss

—— San Francisco Examiner

Riffling, rolling, reeling . . . Ellroy's best

—— The Denver Post

Riveting . . . Impossible to put down . . . An author who breaks all the rules. He's a kamikaze pilot on a collision course with hell. The pen moves madly across the page . . . A book that is one long scream of rage and emptiness and longing

—— The News and Observer

The most original crime writer of our time

—— Spectator

James Ellroy is a genius: the finest American crime writer since Raymond Chandler, and one of the most readable experimental writers in the world

—— Times Literary Supplement

Without him and his crime fiction, there's no David Peace or The Sopranos or Ian Rankin or The Wire or the work of countless writers and film makers who saw a different way of doing things when they first cracked the spine on an Ellroy

—— GQ

Burnside is an accomplished and careful writer. And this is a beautiful book, compelling and strange

—— Margaret Reynolds , The Times

Unsettling, hauntingly memorable tale

—— Sunday Times

Written with deceptive elegance, riddled with gaps and non sequiturs and a clever travesty of several genres, this is a disturbing, provocative book'

—— Guardian


[A Summer of Drowning] brings an eerie glow to the colours and sounds, flora and foodstuffs of the far north

—— Justine Jordan , Guardian
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