Beneath the slick, glittering surface of L.A., an underworld of depravity and wickedness reins. Fritz Brown is a part-time private eye and full-time repo-man who gets his kicks listening to classical music. But the waters get too deep for Brown when he takes a case from a cash-flashing golf caddy named Freddy “Fat Dog” Baker that puts him on the trail of his client’s sister and the older gentleman she’s run off with. But more suspicious than his sister, a classy cellist, is Fat Dog himself, who has a past more sordid than he lets on. Diving into a cesspool of payoffs, incest, and arson, Brown’s California dreaming transforms into a technicolor nightmare. In his hypnotic debut, master crime writer James Ellroy takes us to the edge of an abyss, where nothing, not even Beethoven, can let in the light. Praise for James Ellroy “[Ellroy] can make the night world of sleaze and street monsters come alive on the page.” — St. Louis Globe-Democrat “An undeniably artful frenzy of violence, guilt, and unappeased self- loathing. Ellroy’s crime fiction . . . represents a high mark in the genre.” — Newsday  “James Ellroy brings the mean streets of Los Angeles alive . . . with impressive panache." — Toronto Star JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand , and Blood's a Rover , and the L.A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential , and White Jazz . He lives in Colorado.