L.A. Confidential

The Shroud Shifter speaks:

I clipped my self-sharpening, teflon-coated, brushed-steel axe and swung it at her neck. Her head was sheared cleanly off; blood burst from the cavity, her arms and legs twitched spastically, then her whole body crumpled to the floor. The force of my swing spun me around, and for one second my vision eclipsed the entire scene — blood spattered walls, the body shooting an arterial geyser out the neck, the heart still pumping in reflex...

Martin Plunkett has struck again.

Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns—it’s all in a day’s work for Lieutenant Dave Klein, Los Angeles Police Department. Trained as a lawyer in school, schooled as a strongarm on the street, bought and paid for by the mob, there’s nothing he’s not into and nobody’s better at any of it. But in the fall of 1958, when the Feds announce a full-out investigation into police corruption, everything goes haywire.

Suddenly, the game Klein thought he was running has a new set of rules—and they’re his. He’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 dirty secrets hidden. For Klein, “forty-two and going on dead,” it’s dues time.

And it’s Klein who tells his own story—his voice clipped and sharp and as brutal as the events he’s describing—taking us with him on a hellish journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, greed, and perversion. It’s a world he helped create, but now he’ll do anything to get out of it alive…

Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor-edge, z is crime fiction at its most shattering, and the most explosive novel yet from James Ellroy.

Author of the bestselling “Black Dahlia,” James Ellroy, pens another thriller—a noir epic of three men caught in a web of ambition, perversion and deceit during the fifties in L.A. Each is on a collision course with the Commie scare and a string of brutal murders.

Los Angeles, 1950. Red crosscurrents and a string of brutal killings. Three men caught up in a massive web of ambition, perversion and deceit.

The characters: Danny Upshaw—a sheriff’s deputy stuck with a bunch of snuffs that nobody cares about. Mal Considine—DA’s office brass, climbing on the Red scare bandwagon to advance his own career. Buzz Meeks— bagman, ex-goon and pimp for Howard Hughes, a man who fights communism for the money. All three have purchased tickets to a nightmare worse than their darkest dreams.

X-rated for violence.