Interesting from a historical perspective, but about 400 pages too long. Ellroy has a way of subsuming his characters' individuality to his need for hard-boiled text. Thus we have a 21-year-old woman in the 1940s who refers to another woman as a "gash" ... that is not slang that any such woman would ever use, and it rips you right out of the story.

This book does give you a sort of funhouse mirror view of what life in LA may have been like in the month after Pearl Harbor. The history was enjoyable, and it sent me to the books/Web/Wikipedia many times, where I learned about people like Nao Hamano, Jim Davis, William Parker, Fletch Bowron, Brenda Allen, etc. There's history here that an Angeleno should know, and uncovering it is the signal pleasure of this book.

But the long long LONG story, single unvarying voice, and constant broad racism began to wear on me after page 300. Ellroy sees William H Parker as the hero here, but I really wanted it to be Ward Littell, one of the only characters that stood out as someone with understandable motives and a conscience. Maybe that's my politics showing, which might be unfair for a book review, but there it is.