A monument of the US literature

Second part of the trilogy which began with American Tabloid, "The Cold Six Thousand" is for me the best. These nearly 1,000 pages a portrait of America buffeted by the winds of history through the destiny of a gang of thugs are the shadow of an evocative and emotional power that I have rarely seen in any case in the context of a story that wants to be the cynical and corrosive painting of a fantasizing America on his innocence and his destiny as the heart and the base of his society gangrenous to the bone by corruption, greed, hatred and violence.

The story thus follows the proceedings of a series of fictional characters from the shadow (crooked cops, thugs of the mafia, unscrupulous businessmen) to more or less marked acquaintances with real characters (Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover FBI boss, Howard Hughes, the godfathers of the Mafia), and opposes the natural movement of the American society of the time with their actions on the ideological level to maintain this rigid society by counteracting the civil rights movement (and also to pick up a big lot of money).
Next to the plot or, Ellroy makes us share the complex and sometimes tragic destiny is characters torn between their actions and their beliefs, beliefs that leave the personal tragedies and sometimes revenge but inevitably come back to haunt their conscience. At this game, those who survive will paradoxically both ideologically the most cynical and at the same time the most reattached to noble values ​​(love, faithfulness, forgiveness). Totally corrupt in the first game, most thugs present in this second volume begins on the latest experience feelings of regret, diffuse certainly, but the lead is if it is possible to look a certain way redemption, which given the intrigues and conspiracies which they are involved, may paradoxically be achieved only in the blood.

The Cold Six Thousand thus manages to make us share in parallel the nightmarish portrait of US society corrupted to the bone by hatred and greed, and the exciting and often moving fates of the characters certainly as dirty and greedy for most, but who seek among the flood of violence to which they are mixed and eventually surpass, the spark of redemption that will lead to peace.

The only gripe we could do the story is its precipitation in the outcome of events over the last 100 pages; we feel qu'Ellroy thought he was already considerable attention on the characters and now he would finish his plot! He suddenly tendency to "wipe" a bit on the end, a little handicapping the reader in understanding the sequence of events end.

That does not diminish the value of this important and definitely needed work. A huge book at all levels.