White Jazz

James Ellroy

Mar 2007 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Jerry Orbach

About this audiobook

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.