The Cold Six Thousand: Underworld USA 2 (Underworld USA Trilogy) - Softcover

Ellroy, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 037572740X ISBN 13: 9780375727405

Publisher: Vintage, 2002

Synopsis

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.

In this savagely audacious novel, James Ellroy plants a pipe bomb under the America in the 1960s, lights the fuse, and watches the shrapnel fly. On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their job: to clean up the JFK hit's loose ends and inconvenient witnesses. They are Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Las Vegas cop with family ties to the lunatic right; Ward J. Littell, a defrocked FBI man turned underworld mouthpiece; and Pete Bondurant, a dope-runner and hit-man who serves as the mob's emissary to the anti-Castro underground.

It goes bad from there. For the next five years these night-riders run a whirlwind of plots and counter-plots: Howard Hughes's takeover of Vegas, J. Edgar Hoover's war against the civil rights movement, the heroin trade in Vietnam, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Wilder than L. A. Confidential, more devastating than American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand establishes Ellroy as one of our most fearless novelists.

About this title

Review:

It is the day of Jack Kennedy's assassination--Las Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow Jr arrives in Dallas with instructions to arrest a pimp and make sure he does not survive the arrest. By the time James Ellroy's monumental thriller The Cold Six Thousand reaches its climax, Wayne has taken his own private journey into the heart of American corruption, into a cold hell of betrayal, prejudice and paranoia. In staccato sentences, brief paragraphs of narration and stacks of documentation whose essential truthfulness we dread, we learn the truth about the great assassinations of liberal hope, about the inner-city epidemic of heroin addiction, about the war in Vietnam and the American conflict with Cuba. Wayne and others like him--the ageing hit man Bondurant, the fallen, liberal FBI-man Littell--are the weapons through which the likes of Howard Hughes and J Edgar Hoover work their will. This is a convincingly depressing picture of a world in which the worst things you can imagine regularly come true (because there is always someone who will profit by them). It is a nightmare picture of America-as-Hell which sustains dramatic tension from dateline to dateline, from crisis to crisis. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"Ellroy rips into American culture like a chainsaw in an abbatoir. . . . Pick it up if you dare; put it down if you can." -Time

"A wild ride. . . . An American political underbelly teeming with conspiracy and crime. . . . So hard-boiled you could chip a tooth on it." -The New York Times Book Review

"A ripping read....the book is pure testosterone." -The Plain Dealer

"A great and terrible book about a great and terrible time in America." -The Village Voice

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 037572740X
• ISBN 13: 9780375727405
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 688