Ellroy's back with the third of his LA Quartet!

Christmas 1951, Los Angeles: a city where the police are as crooked as the criminals.

Six prisoners are beaten senseless in their cells by cops crazed on alcohol. For the three L.A.P.D. detectives involved, it will expose the guilty secrets on which they have built their corrupt and violent careers...The novel takes these cops on a sprawling epic of brutal violence and the murderous seedy side of Hollywood. One of the best (and longest) crime novels ever written, it is the heart of Ellroy's four-novel masterpiece, the LA Quartet, and an example of crime writing at its most powerful.

'Ellroy writes as if driven by demons. His brutal, staccato graffiti tips over into art' - Sunday Times

'No emotion is spared; the writing is sparse, the plotting controlled. Not for the faint of heart, this is a big, powerful crime novel and possibly the first important example of the genre in the 1990s' - Sunday Telegraph

'Empty of any unessentials and full of wise-cracking wit' - Mail on Sunday

'Unputdownable' - Time Out

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed 'LA Quartet': The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz. His most recent novel, Blood's a Rover, completes the magisterial 'Underworld USA Trilogy' - the first two volumes of which (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) were both Sunday Times bestsellers.