The Big Nowhere

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.

James Ellroy’s is epic , a crime novel of astonishing detail and scope. It stands as a steel-edged time capsule—Los Angeles in the 1950s, a remarkable era defined in dark shadings.

Pornography.

Police corruption.

Gangland intrigue.

A horrific mass murder that invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law—three cops treading quicksand in the middle.

Ed Exley wants glory. Haunted by his father’s success as a policeman, he will pay any price, break any law to eclipse him. Bud White watched his own father murder his mother—he is now bent on random vengeance, a time bomb with a badge. Trashcan Jack Vincennes shakes down movie stars for a scandal magazine. An old secret possesses him—he’ll do anything to keep it buried. Three cops in a spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, a nightmare that offers no mercy, allows for no survivors.

Greed.

Perversion.

Ruthless ambition.

L.A. Confidential

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.