[UA] [quickie review] James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand

[Kevin Mowery]

    It's good.  Check it out.  Read American Tabloid first if you haven't
already.

    I had a much lengthier review in mind, but it's hard to explain all the
interwoven plot lines, and it's hard to review the novel without explaining
the plot.  American Tabloid was about mobsters, Cuban counter-revolution,
the FBI, the CIA, and J and RFK.

    The Cold Six Thousand is about the CIA, Vietnam, RFK, MLK, the FBI, the
KKK, heroin smuggling, romanticizing war, Howard Hughes, and giving in to
hatred.  My favorite Ellroy character, Big Pete Bondurant--ex-cop, ex-pimp
for Howard Hughes, drug pusher, CIA agent, and hit man--returns as does
liberal ex-FBI agent and lawyer for Howard Hughes and the mob Ward Littell.
New characters include Wayne Tedrow Junior and Senior: a black-friendly Las
Vegas cop with a crush on his stepmother and a degree in chemistry, and his
father: a millionaire hate pamphleteer, casino owner, and friend of J. Edgar
Hoover.

    The story takes us from Dallas in the wake of the Kennedy assassination
where a cover-up is underway, to Las Vegas where Howard Hughes is trying to
buy up all the casinos and the mafia is trying to scam him, to Vietnam where
heroin is being cooked up to make money to fund an overthrow of the Castro
government in Cuba, to the South where Martin Luther King is fighting for
civil rights, and J. Edgar Hoover is funding Ku Klux Klan groups to fight
mail fraud.

    Ellroy's novels are, if nothing else, the stories of bad men doing bad
things for what they think are good causes.  Much like UA.  Also, you can
give each character a UA-style madness meter and mark off hardened and
failed notches for everyone as the story progresses.

Kevin Mowery________ kemowery at earthlink.net
Visit www.narbonic.com for the best online comic
about mutant gerbils and mad scientists on the
internet!  Updated daily.



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