James Ellroy

The 2005 edition of The Best American Crime Writing offers the year's most shocking, compelling, and gripping writing about real-life crime, including Peter Landesman's article about female sex slaves (the most requested and widely read New York Times story of 2004), a piece from The New Yorker by Stephen J. Dubner (the coauthor of Freakanomics) about a high-society silver thief, and an extraordinarily memorable "ode to bar fights" written by Jonathan...

Fred Underhill is a young cop on the rise in Los Angeles in the early 1950's--a town blinded to its own grime by Hollywood glitter; a society nourished by newspaper lies that wants its heroes all-American and squeaky clean. A chance to lead on a possible serial killing is all it takes to fuel Underhill's reckless ambition--and it propels him into a dangerous alliance with certain mad and unstable elements of the law enforcement hierarchy. When the...

Three citizens are butchered during a liquor store holdup. An unstable veteran cop vanishes without a trace. Nothing connects these events except for a nagging hunch in the back of Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins' brain-a sinister foreboding that will lead him through the sin-and-sleaze playground of nighttime LA on the trail of a psycho psychiatrist with a talent for terror and mind-control. His gore-soaked journey through hell will plunge this...

In disgrace after a badly handled arrest in New Orleans, Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is assigned as a liaison officer to an FBI investigation into a series of diabolical and clever bank robberies. Three men have done their homework: they choose bank managers who are having affairs, kidnap their girlfriends, and force the managers to open the banks early. When the bank robbers turn violent, Hopkins finds himself with a bit of information he would rather...

"Freddy Otash is the man in the know and the man to know in Tinseltown. He operates with two simple rules--he'll do anything but murder, and he'll never work with commies. Freddy is a corrupt L.A. cop on the skids. He executed a cop killer named Horvath and it gores him. So Captain "Whiskey" Bill Parker cans him. Now, Freddy dons an array of new hats--sleazoid private eye, shakedown artist, matchmaker for Rock Hudson, pimp for President John F. Kennedy--and,...

"From "one of the great American writers of our time" (Los Angeles Times Book Review)--a brilliant historical crime novel, a pulse-pounding, as-it-happens narrative that unfolds in Los Angeles and Mexico in the wake in Pearl Harbor. New Year's Eve 1941, war has been declared and the Japanese internment is in full swing. Los Angeles is gripped by war fever and racial hatred. Sergeant Dudley Smith of the Los Angeles Police Department is now Army Captain...