The Cold Six Thousand

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

Set between the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, Ellroy's latest romp careens around the world, stopping in Las Vegas, Vietnam, Cuba, and Memphis, riffing on pop culture and icons at every turn. Taking up where American Tabloid left off, Ellroy, using his trademark staccato prose and the most basic sentence structure, recreates the dark side of the 1960s, with all of the decade's turmoil, radicalism, and chaos. He begins the tale in Dallas on November 22, 1963, where a young cop, Wayne Tedrow, Jr., finds himself inextricably involved in the cover-up of Kennedy's murder. It's just the beginning of Tedrow's five-year nightmare that will plunge him into the depths of the country's corrupt underbelly.