White Jazz

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, were international best-sellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine's Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. He lives in Kansas City.

"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

"Riveting. . . . Impossible to put down. . . . An author who breaks all the rules. He's a kamikaze pilot on a collision course with hell. The pen moves madly across the page. . . . A book that is one long scream of rage and emptiness and longing." --The News and Observer

LOS ANGELES, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns -- it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. 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.
Klein tells his own story -- his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing -- taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive.
Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.