White Jazz

Cynical and crooked enough to survive, LAPD Detective Dave Klein ("42 and going on dead") knows he's being set up. The cops want him to hush up a burglary; the district attorney wants him to lean on a leftist politician; the Mob wants him to get rid of a federal witness--even Howard Hughes has a dirty job for him. James Ellroy's masterful noir novel, published in 1992, is the concluding installment in his L.A. Quartet (THE BLACK DAHLIA, 1987; THE BIG NOWHERE, 1988; L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, 1990). Scott Brick delivers every savage beating, every brutal murder, every twisted sexual encounter with neon precision. Handling Ellroy's syncopated rhythms with a virtuoso's agility, Brick transports listeners to 1950s Los Angeles and a nightmare of human decadence. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

August 31, 1992
Blacker than noir, this latest novel from the author of L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia is set in 1958 and features a dirty LAPD detective with a breathtaking mastery of corruption. Dave Klein, a gangland heavy, USC law grad and police lieutenant, can thread a legal loophole as easily as he slips on brass knuckles. Assigned by the police commissioner to head an investigation into a narc squad payoff source, Klein smells a setup. To save himself, he traces a genealogy of double-dealing that includes incest, institutionalized bribery and police corruption, all going back decades. Ellroy's telegraphic style, which reduces masses of plot information to quick-study shorthand, captures the seamy stream-of-consciousness of this tainted cop and carries the reader from initial repulsion to a fascination that lingers long after the story's last notes have faded away. Ellroy adroitly transfers the manic energy of scat and bebop to this final volume of his tense, lowdown L.A. epic. Moreover, he demonstrates perfect pitch for illegalese, but the hepcat banter never obscures the complex plotting of politics and pre-Miranda rights police work, a combination that here makes most other crime novels seem naive. 40,000 first printing; BOMC alternate.