L.A. Quartet (4)

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.

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

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.

The Black Dahlia is a police novel on an epic scale; a classic period piece that provides a startling conclusion to America’s most infamous unsolved murder mystery. Already hailed as a masterpiece, it establishes James Ellroy as this country’s most powerful living writer of noir fiction. On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia, and her murder sparks the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and adversaries in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia — driven by dark needs to know everything about her life, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl’s twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches — into a region of total madness. With the no-punches-held style that has become the trademark of a James Ellroy novel, this brilliant and savagely original author launches the reader on a roller-coaster ride through the violent world of the ’40s L.A. cop.