Description:

Review

“One of the great American writers or our time.” — Los Angeles Times

“A blood poet who writes as chain saws crank, Ellroy has vigorously redefined the well-shadowed turf of contemporary crime fiction.”_ —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution _

"An undeniably artful frenzy of violence, guilt, and unappeased self-loathing. Ellroy's crime fiction represents a high mark in the genre." --_Newsday_

“Ellroy rips into American culture like a chainsaw in an abbatoir.” --_Time_

"He's forged a style uniquely his own. Energetic and abrasive, it comes at us like a speed freak. . . . The power and pull of Ellroy's writing is unmistakable." --_Los Angeles Times Book Review_

"Ellroy is the author of some of the most powerful crime novels ever written." --_The New York Times_

“Garrotte-tight prose. . . . [Ellroy is] a force of nature, stringing together words into barbed-wire lariats which he then uses to choke the bejesus out of you. . . . His novels are all muscle, zero fat.”_ --Austin Chronicle_

"Memorable, stunning, incisive. . . . It is possible, I think, to make the argument that in the past couple of decades, Mr. Ellroy has been the most influential writer in America." --Otto Penzler,_ The New York Sun_

“Nobody in this generation matches the breadth and depth of James Ellroy’s way with noir.”_ --Detroit News_

"Ellroy sprays declarative sentences like machine-gun bullets, blasting to kingdom come all notions of justice, heroism, and simple decency." --_Entertainment Weekly_

"[Ellroy] can make the night world of sleaze and street monsters come alive on the page." --_St. Louis Globe-Democrat_

Product Description

A botched liquor store heist leaves three grisly dead. A hero cop is missing. Nobody could see a pattern in these two stray bits of information–no one except Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins, a brilliant and disturbed L.A. cop with an obsessive desire to protect the innocent. To him they lead to one horrifying conclusion--a killer is on the loose and preying on his city. From the master of L.A. noir comes this beautiful and brutal tale of a cop and a criminal squared off in a life and death struggle.