He's a direct descendant of Dashiell Hammett, Ross McDonald, and Jack Webb, distilling that dark-noir trio into something particularly electrifying. From the beginning, with Brown's Requiem and later with his fictionalized take on Hollywood's greatest, unsolved bifurcated-torso-slaying in The Black Dahlia, he has been less a writer of neo-noir crime fiction ('NeNo CriFi,' I suppose, to his die-hards) than a force of nature, stringing together words into barbed-wire lariats which he then uses to choke the bejeezus out of you. It's impossible to mistake the garrote-tight prose of this self-proclaimed 'demon dog of American fiction' for the sudden-seeming verbiage of any other writer. American Tabloid was a slo-mo Sixties wipeout. His mother's rape death fueled a bio-horror-show. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. The Cold Six Thousandis a masterpiece.James Ellroy looks like he writes: He looks hard. His story is ground zero in Ellroy's stunning vision: historical confluence as American Nightmare. Tedrow stands witness, as the icons of an iconic era mingle with cops, killers, hoods, and provocateurs.

Edgar Hoover, shipping out to Vietnam and returning home, the bearer of white powder, plotting new deaths as 1968 approaches. Ellroy's furiously paced narrative tracks Tedrow's ride: Dallas back to Vegas, with the Mob and Howard Hughes, south with the Klan and J.

He's got $6,000 in cash and no idea that he is about to plunge into the cover-up conspiracy already brewing around Kennedy's assassination, no idea that this will mark the beginning of a hellish five-year ride through the private underbelly of public policy. Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. The heart of the American Dream detonated. The result is a work of fierce, epic fiction, a speedball through our most tumultuous time. Now, inThe Cold Six Thousand, his most ambitious and explosive novel yet, he puts the whole of the 1960s under his blistering lens. James Ellroy's high-velocity, best-selling novels have redefined noir for our age, propelling us within inches of the dark realities of America's recent history. Confidential,White Jazz,American Tabloid.

The cold six thousand review