The Cold Six Thousand(2001)

James Ellroy

Dallas, November '63 - the heart of the American Dream detonated. Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. He's got six thousand in cash and no idea he is about to plunge into the cover-up conspiracy already brewing around the assassination of JFK, 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 journey: Dallas 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. . . The Cold Six Thousand is the 1960s under Ellroy's blistering lens, the icons of the era mingling with cops, killers, hoods, and provocateurs. Historical confluence as American nightmare. Fierce, epic fiction. A masterpiece.