The first installment of the Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy. 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 unconnnected on the police files.
But Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins begins to see a pattern: he senses connections between this string of seemingly motiveless, pointless and unsolved killings. Then the murderer emerges not as a random killer, but a cool, efficient despatcher - in his own eyes a saver of souls and protector of the innocent.
As they are drawn inexorably together, Hopkins and the murderer challenge each other in a confrontation which pits icy intelligence against white-heated madness...
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed 'LA Quartet':The Black Dahlia,The Big Nowhere,LA ConfidentialandWhite Jazz. His novelBlood's a Rovercompletes the magisterial 'Underworld USA Trilogy' the first two volumes of which (American TabloidandThe Cold Six Thousand) were bothSunday Timesbestsellers. His most recent novel,Perfidia, is the first instalment in Ellroy's second 'L.A. Quartet'.