The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White
Jazz, American Tabloid... James Ellroy's high-velocity,
best-selling novels have redefined noir for our age, propelling us
within inches of the dark realities of America's recent history. Now, in
The Cold Six Thousand, his most ambitious and explosive novel
yet, he puts the whole of the 1960s under his blistering lens. The
result is a work of fierce, epic fiction, a speedball through our most
tumultuous time.
It begins in Dallas. November 22, 1963. The heart of the American
Dream detonated.
Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. He's got $6,000 in
cash and no idea that he is about to plunge into the cover-up conspiracy already brewing around
Kennedy's assassination, no idea that this will mark the beginning of a hellish five-year ride
through the private underbelly of public policy.
Ellroy's furiously paced narrative tracks Tedrow's ride: Dallas back to Vegas, with the Mob and
Howard Hughes, south with the Klan and J. Edgar Hoover, shipping out to Vietnam and
returning home, the bearer of white powder, plotting new deaths as 1968 approaches ...
Tedrow stands witness, as the icons of an iconic era mingle with cops, killers, hoods, and
provocateurs. His story is ground zero in Ellroy's stunning vision: historical confluence as
American Nightmare.
The Cold Six Thousand is a masterpiece.
"The Cold Six Thousand is an exercisein audacity: a difficult book, which demands to be read on its own terms. Ellroy is either our greatest obsessive writer, or our most obsessive greate writer. Either way, he is turning the crime novel's mean streets into superhighways. This book is designed to shock, and shock it does." -- Michael Carlson, Financial Times, UK