White Jazz: James Ellroy (L.A. Quartet, 4) - Softcover

"A vivid, enthralling read... James Ellroy is the outstanding American crime writer of his generation" (Independent)

"Recent 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 Society)

"One of the great American writers of our time" (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

"White Jazz makes previous detective fiction read like Dr. Seuss" (San Francisco Examiner)

"Riffling, rolling, reeling . . . Ellroy's best" (The Denver Post)

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...