by James Ellroy
A massive novel of World War II Los Angeles. The crowning work of an American master.
It is January, 1942. Torrential rainstorms hit L.A. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops rate it a routine dead-man job. They're grievously wrong. It's a summons to misalliance and all the spoils of a brand-new war.
Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He's a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, caught up in the maelstrom of the Japanese internment. Dudley Smith is an LAPD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He's gone rogue and gone all-the-way Fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She's a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core.
They've signed on for the dead-man job. They've got a hot date with History. They will fight their inner wars within The War with unstoppable fury.
"This obsessive, wholly satisfying probing of 20th-century American history deserves a wide readership." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A gritty, absorbing novel that proves once again that Ellroy is the rightful heir of Chandler, Cain, and Hammett." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed L.A. Quartet - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz, as well as the Underworld USA trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood's a Rover. He is the author of one work of non-fiction, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.
He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming
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