White Jazz - Softcover

Ellroy, James

3.92

9,164 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449000885 ISBN 13: 9780449000885

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1997

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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.

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Review:

"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)

From the Publisher:

'The most original crime writer of our time' Spectator

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