The L.A. quartet

The Black Dahlia depicts the infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case.

A young cop morphs into the obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger.

His rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell. The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel with the political novel.

It is winter, 1950, and the L.A. authorities are targeting movieland Reds. The three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the kudos they can.

But a series of brutal sex killing intervenes ... L.A. Confidential plumbs the depths: political corruption, scandal-rag journalism, racism and gangland wars, savage slaughter in an all-night hash house. And the inglorious Los Angeles Police Department to disentangle the conspiracy that links it all together. White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a cop who's gone to the bad - killer, slum landlord and parasitic exploiter.

He's also a pawn in a police power struggle and beginning to realize it.

But he's just met a woman and wants to claw his way out of the pit.

Somehow.