by James Ellroy
First published 2009
Los Angeles burns in 1968. Martin Luther King lies dead. Robert Kennedy falls to an assassin's bullet. The city erupts in violence while conspiracy theories spread like wildfire. Three men navigate this chaos. A government enforcer serves the president's darkest needs. An ex-cop runs heroin through the streets. A private investigator hunts a woman whose secrets could ignite the nation. Around them swirl the powerful and corrupt. Howard Hughes schemes from his tower. Richard Nixon plots his rise. J. Edgar Hoover pulls strings from Washington. Right-wing killers and left-wing revolutionaries prepare for war. The Democratic Convention in Chicago approaches like a storm. Gunfire echoes through south LA. Each man pursues his own obsessions while the country tears itself apart. Violence replaces the dreams of free love. Greed poisons every transaction. The three protagonists circle each other in a deadly dance where one wrong move could detonate everything.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, mystery, crime, action
Vibes: dark, fast-paced, suspenseful
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, government-conspiracy, morally-ambiguous-characters
Setting: Chicago, Los Angeles, South LA, Washington
Period: 1968
656 pages · Hardcover · Knopf Publishing Group
Content warnings: violence