Rating: 
Summary: Tough as nails and well worth my time
Review: LA Confidential begins as hardboiled as a book has ever begun. It's Los Angeles in the early 1950s with plenty of organized crime and questionable police tactics. The just of the story is in the first page, Mickey Cohen the gangster that runs Los Angeles is going to prison which leaves a vacuum in the city. The rest of the book is figuring out who is trying to take over his rackets. The fun of the book is watching the characters battle to figure it out. As is usually my wont, I read the book because I liked the movie so much. And with many great movies that are books, LA Confidential is just more of a good thing. The same main characters and a couple of interesting tertiary ones roll through Los Angles with a show horse of justice, though ambition and corruption are the real guiding factor. Having seen the movie doesn't ruin the book, because the book is enough different to keep you wondering and Ellroy is such a good writer that you'll enjoy even the familiar dialogue. This is the kind of book that makes guys want to read books.
Rating:
Summary: A Staggering Piece of Crime Fiction
Review: Jame's Ellroy's "LA Confidential" is a remarkable book. Most people know of it only by it's excellent film adaptation. On it's own, it is an incredibly complex, brutal, and utterly facinating look into the LAPD of the 1950's. The book covers three main characters, as most of Ellroy's work does: Officer Wendell "Bud" White", a strongarm cop with a dark past that he uses to fuel his work; Sergent Jack Vincennes, a narc cop who is in love with his Hollywood connections and hides secrets of his own, trying to bury them as the crusading "Big V", and Sergent Edmund J. Exley, a war hero with a celebrated cop family who is driven by his sense of justice and the desire to live up to his father's expectations. These three occupy the larger canvas of LA in the 50's. The story starts with background on the three and the situation in LA, and moves on to the Nite Owl murders, a brutal slaying of innocents who's solution will eventually drive these men to first work against each other, and then together as the story becomes more entagled in the seedy LA underworld. Each man is noble on a basic level, but has past demons that occasionally threaten to drag them down. The story in wrentching, as are all of Ellroy's "LA Quartet" novel, and fits in nicely with the previous novel "The Big Nowhere", and the next bok "White Jazz". In "LA Confidential" Ellroy never lets up for a moment. The action is driven along by his breakneck writing style, and his staccato style shows it's first signs in the head of Jack Vincennes. The book is a marriage of tight plotting, facinating characters, and the dark background of LA. It is a triumph for James Ellroy.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent print noir
Review: James Ellroy's dark, brutal tale of three tortured souls in the LAPD of the 1950's benefits from the staccato, abrasive style in which it is written. At first, I had trouble getting into it. ... Soon, however, I came to appreciate the spare economy of the writing, as unsentimental and hard as the protagonists. The story revolves around three detectives whose lives, both professional and personal, are always teetering on the edge of collapse and the web of lies and concealment surrounding a sensational murder case in which each finds his own opportunity for a sort of redemption. A masterful performance by Ellroy.
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