James Ellroy

Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can't stand music, or any loud sounds. He's got a beautiful wife, but he can't get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He's a thinking man's cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there's something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed...

Nobody plays accordion like Dick Contino. His skilled fingers can find beauty in even the schmaltziest borscht belt favorites, and with his matinee-idol looks he could be a real star. Right now, though, he's slumming it as the headliner in a Grade Z teenybopper picture called Daddy-O. He's too good for this movie, and finishing it is going to take him to a very dark place. Daddy-O and Dick Contino are both real, their stories dredged out of the past...

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,...

In the LAPD of 1958, Lt. Dave Klein is hung out as bait to take the fall for police corruption.

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.