This was the final book in the L.A Quartet. I believe, ultimately, it was his weakest in the trilogy. While the action skips along, the prose becomes a little disjointed and sloppy. We are kept in the sphere of the general plot-line, but the details become muddled and the ideas not as great as they could have been because of the presentation. The dialogue, as well, does not appeared as focused and sharp as in the other books. A decent ride, but a disappointing ending to the L.A Quartet.

3 stars. ( )

Lt. Dave Klein is put on a burglary case he's disinterested in, but he suspects police chief Edmund Exley is using him for other purposes.

This is the final book in a loose series written by Ellroy; given where the last book ended, I was hoping for a lot more of the story that was started in the previous title. However, this book starts with yet another main character (curiously enough, speaking in a first-person narration, which has not happened since the first book the series) working on a case seemingly unconnected with the issues of the last book. The case itself is not interesting, nor is its nonsensical resolution that basically falls in Klein's lap with him doing minimal police work to get the facts. At this point, Ellroy seems to be derivative of himself, repeating the same types of things we saw in the previous books but acting like it's a new angle.

Furthermore, while all of Ellroy's protagonists have been less-than-stellar people (to put it mildly in some cases), this is the first time his main character is downright unlikable. I didn't really feel like there were any high stakes here because I didn't care what happened Klein. In fact, it was disappointing that of all Ellroy's protagonists Klein is one of the few who remains alive at the end of his book. This title does end somewhat ambiguously, although not on as much of a cliffhanger as the previous two in the series.

For the audiobook reader, I was amazed to find myself unhappy with Scott Brick as the narrator for this book. While I've loved Brick's narration of other books in the past, he was not a good fit here. He could do distinct voices and accents well, but his tone was all wrong for Klein and for the book as a whole. When I've read other noir-style mystery titles as audiobooks in the past (including ones in this series), the readers have managed to convey that old-film style of speech that fits the genre well. In addition, Ellroy's use of short, staccato sentences did not mesh well with the audiobook format (or perhaps just with Brick's reading of this title).

Overall, this was a big letdown for the finale of a series I had been invested in reading. ( )

Even burning the dross off of prose leaves something haunted. The menace in Ellroy's streets is a puzzling presence, certainly along the likes of Mieville and Sinclair as it detours into origins and auras, Merleau-Ponty's flux made manifest in gridded streets and contained populations and vices. Ellroy slipped some going into the final act: hyperbole infected his plot and pus reigned supreme. Why have a voyeur/killer plot with incest overtones when one can fashion a virtual tribe of such, all of whom are bereft of conclusive geneology. ( )

Wild, disturbing, convoluted, thrilling, depressing. ( )

Bad cops—Chief of Detectives on down. Gangsters—Mickey Cohen—one of them. Good story—but staccato narrative—irritating. ( )