The Cold Six Thousand: Underworld USA 2

Continuing the audacious fictional counter-history that he began in American Tabloid, the demon dog of American literature reimagines the bloody events that erupted in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and culminated five years later in the bookend assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. nThe internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. nIn 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. n nIt 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.n