White Jazz

'The king of macho noir' GUARDIAN
'The American Dostoevsky' JOYCE CAROL OATES
'One of the great American writers of our time' LOS ANGELES TIMES
'Fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted and paranoid' STEPHEN KING
'One of the most original and daring writers alive' INDEPENDENT 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...

James Ellroy