Best-selling crime fiction author James Ellroy returns with the fourth in his LA Quartet.
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...
A startling panorama of Los Angeles in the fifties. New Year's Eve as 1949 turns to 1950, Los Angeles: The City of Angels has becomes the city of the Angel of Death.
Communist witch-hunts and insanely violent killings are terrorising the community. Three men are plunged into a maelstrom of violence and deceit when their lives become inextricably linked as each one confronts his own personal darkness. The second of the LA Quartet, the epigraph for The Big Nowhere is a passage from a novel; "It was written that I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice- Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness."
