Well that is an insane ride with three rogue cops on the thin line between justice and oblivion. Bud White is a thug, a bloody handed brute with a weakness for battered women. Jack Vincennes is a narcotics detective with Hollywood connections who feeds tips to scandal sheets. And Ed Exley is the straight-laced scion of a prominent police family, aiming to surpass his legendary father. Over eight years in the 1950s, the three of them come to the edge of the destroying each other, and then uncover a truly horrific conspiracy that stretches across Los Angeles.

The initiating incident is the historic Bloody Christmas scandal, where drunken LAPD officers beat a group of prisoners on the rumor that one of them had severely wounded an arresting officer. Exley informs on the other officers. Bud White is demoted, his partner jailed, and Vincennes loses his treasured Narcotics assignment and is assigned to Vice.

A few years later, the second incident is the Nite Owl murders: six people shotgunned to pieces in a late night cafe, including a former cop and small-time pimp. LAPD makes three African Americans for the crime, and their alibi is that while all this was happening they were brutally gangraping a Mexican girl. Exley closes the case, shooting all three suspects after they escape from jail.

Meanwhile Vincennes is investigating and getting nowhere on a book of unusual pornography, both high class and incredibly perverse, with one orgy framed as  a bloodbath. Vincennes' muck-racking contact at the scandal magazine Hush Hush is murdered, literally severed limb from limb. An strange and high-class pimp, Pierce Patchett is involved. His main racket is a stable of prostitutes who have been surgically altered to look like movie stars, but he's too well insulated to be touched.

And then everything swirls together in a vortex involving old secrets, new ambition, organized crime, politics, family, women, violence, dope, revenge... everything!  The plot is complex, but where this book hits best is in the dialogue, the crackling slang of cops and criminals and tough, brutal men, making a tough brutal world.

This is an ugly book, but also a gorgeous one.