White Jazz

'The king of macho noir' GUARDIAN 'The American Dostoevsky' JOYCE CAROL OATES 'One of the great American writers of our time' LOS ANGELES TIMES ' Fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted and paranoid' STEPHEN KING 'One of the most original and daring writers alive' INDEPENDENT Los Angeles, 1958: a city on the make. A boom town at the edge of a new era ripe for plunder. Lieutenant Dave Klein: in turn a lawyer, bagman, slum landlord, mob killer. Klein stands at the centre of a complex web of plots where violence and death will intersect. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer--a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire. Klein's been hung out as bait, " a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, " forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time...