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The Cold Six Thousand
950 pages
A feverish, machine-gun descent into the darkest, bloodiest conspiracies of the 1960s American underbelly.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being strapped to a chair and battered with the ugliest, most visceral truths of the American twentieth century. The narrative moves at a blistering, propulsive clip, driven by a famously aggressive, staccato prose style that fires short, rhythmic sentences like a machine gun. It is a deeply cynical and relentless experience, immersing the reader in a feverish, paranoid atmosphere where every character is compromised and no institution is pure. The mood is dread-soaked and claustrophobic, offering no moral high ground as it drags you through the muck of historical trauma and systemic rot. It will absolutely devour readers who crave uncompromising, ultra-gritty crime fiction and want to be overwhelmed by a dark, stylized vision of a nation losing its soul.
- Mood
- feverish
- paranoid
- claustrophobic
- dread-soaked
- Tone
- cynical
- relentless
- brutal
- nihilistic
- hardboiled
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- systemic corruption · moral decay · the death of the American Dream · historical trauma · toxic power
- The writing
- Aggressive, telegraphic, and staccato, firing short, rhythmic sentences like a machine gun.
- The arc
- A relentless plunge from initial shock into an inescapable, suffocating abyss of moral compromise and national nightmare.
- Who it's for
- Fans of ultra-gritty, uncompromising crime fiction who want to be overwhelmed by a dark, stylized vision of history.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- racial slurs
- misogyny
- drug abuse
- political assassination
About the book
"It begins in Dallas. November 22, 1963. The heart of the American Dream detonated." "Wayne Tedrow Jr., a young Vegas cop, arrives with a loathsome job to do. He's got $6,000 in cash and no idea that he is about to plunge into the cover-up conspiracy already brewing around Kennedy's assassination, no idea that this will mark the beginning of a hellish five-year ride through the private underbelly of public policy.".
"Ellroy's furiously paced narrative tracks Tedrow's ride: Dallas back to Vegas, with the Mob and Howard Hughes, south with the Klan and J. Edgar Hoover, shipping out to Vietnam and returning home, the bearer of white powder, plotting new deaths as 1968 approaches..." "Tedrow stands witness - as the icons of an iconic era mingle with cops, killers, hoods, and provocateurs. His story is ground zero in Ellroy's stunning vision: historical confluence as American Nightmare."--BOOK JACKET.
Description from Open Library.
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