Author:James Ellroy
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...
A vivid, enthralling read... James Ellroy is the outstanding American crime writer of his generation
—— IndependentRecent 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 SocietyOne of the great American writers of our time
—— Los Angeles Times Book ReviewWhite Jazz makes previous detective fiction read like Dr. Seuss
—— San Francisco ExaminerRiffling, rolling, reeling . . . Ellroy's best
—— The Denver PostRiveting . . . 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 ObserverThe most original crime writer of our time
—— SpectatorJames 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 SupplementWithout 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
—— GQPears brings to life a vibrant 17th-century world...a tour de force
—— Daily TelegraphCrammed with period detail, it's as much a novel of ideas as it is of character
—— Val McDermid , The Week