A novel of the Kennedy era, portraying the president in a far from flattering light. There are three protagonists: a CIA agent who pimps for JFK, another agent who trains anti-Castro rebels, and a lawyer who is a Mafia hunter. Through their eyes are seen the conflicting interests of the Kennedys, the director of the FBI, organized crime, organized labor, Castro and Cuban exiles.
Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to.
From the widely acclaimed author of" L.A. Confidential" comes the absorbing story of three man caught in a massive web of ambition, perversion, and deceit. ""The Big Nowhere" "makes you feel as if you are really in the Hollywood of 1950".--"The Wall Street Journal".
America's greatest crime writer investigates his mother's murder. On 21 June
1958, Geneva Hilliker Ellroy left her home in California. She was found
strangled the next day. Her ten year-old son James had been with her estranged
husband all weekend and was informed of her death on his return. Her murderer
was never found, but her death had an enduring effect on her son - he spent
his teens and early adult years as a wino, petty burglar and derelict. Only
later, through his obsession with crime fiction, triggered by his mother's
murder, did Ellroy begin to delve into his past. Shortly after the publication
of his groundbreaking novel WHITE JAZZ, he determined to return to Los Angeles
and, with the help of veteran detective Bill Stoner, attempt to solve the
38-year-old killing. The result is one of the few classics of crime non-
fiction and autobiography to appear in the last few decades; a hypnotic trip
to America's underbelly and one man's tortured soul.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016 A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK 'Memoirs of a Geisha meets The Piano Teacher, in the best way.' InStyle Amaterasu Takahashi has spent her life grieving for her daughter Yuko and grandson Hideo, who were victims of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Now a widow living in America, she believes that one man was responsible for her loss; a local doctor who caused an irreparable rift between mother and daughter. When a man claiming to be Hideo arrives on her doorstep, she is forced to revisit the past; the hurt and humiliation of her early life, the intoxication of a first romance and the realisation that if she had loved her daughter in a different way, she might still be alive today.
The Black Dahlia is a roman noir on an epic scale: a classic period piece that provides a startling conclusion to America's most infamous unsolved murder mystery--the murder of the beautiful young woman known as The Black Dahlia.