White Jazz, James Ellroy
White Jazz, James Ellroy
2 Rating(s)
List: $9.99 | Sale: $7.00
Club: $4.99

White Jazz

Author: James Ellroy

Series: L. A. Quartet

Narrator: Jerry Orbach

Abridged: 2 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/13/2007


Synopsis

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia.

Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. 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.

Klein tells his own story--his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing--taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive.

Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.

About The Author

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, the Second L.A. Quartet: Perfidia, and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s a Rover. These novels have won numerous honors and were international bestsellers. Ellroy currently lives in Los Angeles.Jerry Orbach was an an American actor best known for his role as Detective Lennie Briscoe in Law & Order. He studied drama at the University of Illinois and at Northwestern. Orbach had many roles in musicals before he broke out into television, and was nominated for a Tony Award in 1976 for his performance in Chicago. He was also the voice of Lumiere in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Jerry Orbach passed away in 2004.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Baba on October 27, 2022

The year is 1958, the place is LA, our protagonist is Lt. Dave Klein, movie star looks, in his 50s' and already earned his police pension… also one-time lawyer and also currently… slum lord, bag-man, wheeler dealer and killer-for-mob-hire! The LA police are corrupt through and through and have been......more

Goodreads review by Kemper on February 18, 2019

This conclusion to James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet is just as wholesome and uplifting as the previous three books with his usual cast of characters such as corrupt cops, gangsters, hustlers, blackmailers, shakedown artists, bag men, thieves, junkies, drug dealers, dog killers, whores, johns, pimps, peep......more

Goodreads review by Richard on January 11, 2016

Every time I've finished an Ellroy book, I've had to sit back and process everything, climb up out of his world, shake my brain free of his expert grasp. With White Jazz, he concludes his epic "L.A. Quartet," by narrowing his focus even more so than in The Black Dahlia, and miles away from the g......more

Goodreads review by Krok Zero on June 08, 2011

Feature this is one of Ellroy's best. Dig the economy: scale back the unsustainable sprawl of L.A. Confidential—streamline it. The catch: still cram a CRAAAZY amount of wild plot into a relatively small frame. Single protagonist, single POV—a departure. NO redemptive qualities for the protag: Ellroy's......more

Goodreads review by Jack on August 17, 2021

I’m well aware I’m going to receive some flak for this, so just know that I consider myself a big fan of Ellroy’s first three LA Quartet novels. In fact, The Black Dahlia is on my “desert island books” shelf. But this almost felt like a parody of late 1980s Ellroy. The short, clipped sentences were......more


Quotes

"One of the great American writers of our time." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"White Jazz makes previous detective fiction read like Dr. Seuss." --San Francisco Examiner

"Riffling, rolling, reeling. . . . Ellroy's best." --The Denver Post

"Riveting. . . . Impossible to put down. . . . An author who breaks all the rules. He's a kamikaze pilot on a collision course with hell. The pen moves madly across the page. . . . A book that is one long scream of rage and emptiness and longing." --The News and Observer