James Ellroy

The 2005 edition of The Best American Crime Writing offers the year's most shocking, compelling, and gripping writing about real-life crime, including Peter Landesman's article about female sex slaves (the most requested and widely read New York Times story of 2004), a piece from The New Yorker by Stephen J. Dubner (the coauthor of Freakanomics) about a high-society silver thief, and an extraordinarily memorable "ode to bar fights" written by Jonathan...

Two cops become both friends and adversaries as they investigate the torture murder of a beautiful young woman found in Los Angeles in 1947.

Presents an afterword and six stories that take place in Los Angeles from 1947 to 1959, the same crime-ridden, sex-crazed period of history as his L.A. Quartet novels, which include The Big Nowhere.

Somewhere out there is a murderer with over twenty killings to his name - each an apparently random slaying of a woman, over a twenty-year period and all unconnected on the police files. But Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins begins to see a pattern.

It was simple...and diabolical. Simply select a bank manager, kidnap his girlfriend, and then hold her hostage until you've cleaned out the bank. At first, it was almost a game. But it turned into an orgy of violence, rape and insane revenge.

"A pulse-pounding, as-it-happens narrative that unfolds in Los Angeles over twenty-three days beginning on December 6, 1941. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. The United States teeters on the edge of war. The roundup of allegedly treasonous Japanese Americans is about to begin. And in L.A., a Japanese family is found dead. Murder or ritual suicide? The investigation will draw four people into a totally Ellroy-ian tangle: a brilliant Japanese...