#2 Underworld USA

The Cold Six Thousand

James Ellroy
4.03
8,225 ratings 460 reviews
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia . In this savagely audacious novel, James Ellroy plants a pipe bomb under the America in the 1960s, lights the fuse, and watches the shrapnel fly. On November 22, 1963 three men converge in Dallas. Their to clean up the JFK hit’s loose ends and inconvenient witnesses. They are Wayne Tedrow, Jr., a Las Vegas cop with family ties to the lunatic right; Ward J. Littell, a defrocked FBI man turned underworld mouthpiece; and Pete Bondurant, a dope-runner and hit-man who serves as the mob’s emissary to the anti-Castro underground. It goes bad from there. For the next five years these night-riders run a whirlwind of plots and Howard Hughes’s takeover of Vegas, J. Edgar Hoover’s war against the civil rights movement, the heroin trade in Vietnam, and the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Wilder than L. A. Confidential, more devastating than American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand establishes Ellroy as one of our most fearless novelists.
Genres: FictionCrimeNoirHistorical FictionMysteryThrillerNovelsThe United States Of AmericaAudiobookAmerican
688 Pages

Community Reviews:

5 star
2939 (36%)
4 star
3249 (40%)
3 star
1544 (19%)
2 star
367 (4%)
1 star
126 (2%)

Readers also enjoyed

Other books by James Ellroy

Underworld USA Series

Lists with this book

The Big Sleep
The Maltese Falcon
The Long Goodbye
Best Hardboiled & Noir fiction
695 books871 voters
No Country for Old Men
American Tabloid
The Cold Six Thousand
The Power of the Dog
Caught Stealing
L.A. Confidential
New School of Noir
197 books259 voters
Caught Stealing
The Devil All the Time
Winter's Bone
Best Noir of the 21st Century
241 books373 voters