The Cold Six Thousand.

I want to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their humanity.
-James Ellroy

I recently finished reading Ellroy’s epic crime novel, The Cold Six Thousand. It's a classic. Starting with the FBI-orchestrated Kennedy assassination (detailed in Ellroy’s fore-running novel American Tabloid), we’re introduced to hitman Wayne Tedrow Jr, who has arrived in Dallas to kill a black pimp. The moment he gets off the plane, he’s caught up in the JFK conspiracy. FBI man Ward Littell and Howard Hughes’ hitman Pete Bondurant return to clear up the mess of their slightly botched Kennedy hit (fall guy Oswald is still alive after he kills the policeman sent to kill him). Littell and Bondurant then continue to shape American history via ‘Nam war dope dealing, further JFK cover-ups, a link-up with Tedrow Jr and eventually the whacking of both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

The Cold Six Thousand is a riveting, violent-as-hell read and a great retelling of history, although Ellroy’s choppy sentence structure becomes testing after a few hundred pages. There's also a couple of instances when things become unrealistic. For instance, a man has been paid to kill someone- someone who, it emerges, is the same individual the hitman has been tracking down for some time, for his own reasons. I thought I'd misunderstood this, but a quick Google search shows this as a bizarre coincidence within the story.

That said, I love conspiracy stories where the author shows us flashes of a history that we’re already familiar with, only accompanied with a very different back story, tempting us to change our beliefs about the past. Ellroy is the master of this. As is usual from Ellroy, it's ridiculously complex so be prepared for a head fuck. An incredible, 700-page, Sunday-Times-Bestselling head fuck. Read American Tabloid. Then read The Cold Six Thousand.