L.A. Noir

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What to expect

Mid-century Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as 'the white spot of America', a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world's most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of 'pleasure girls' and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men - one L.A.'s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief - each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city.

The Mob had to contend with downtown business (the Chandlers, of LA Times fame), City Hall, and above all the LAPD - and the story is gripping. In these pages you will find the kind of gangsters, cops, pols, and madams familiar from The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and LA Confidential - only this time it's non-fiction, a serious portrait of how the 20th century's most dangerously unaccountable, intrusive model of pre-emptive policing got started. It's a story with great resonance today.

Read by Kirby Heyborne

(p) 2012 Tantor, Inc

Critics Review

Fascinating... flat out entertaining
Michael Connelly
A highly original and altogether splendid history... utterly compelling
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Buntin has unearthed in the history of 20th-century L.A. a pervasive criminality that is far more appalling than anything to be found even in the most brutal novels of James Ellroy.
WASHINGTON POST
Completely entertaining... a colourful and entirely different take on the vices of Tinseltown.
DAILY BEAST
Dragnet, One Adam Twelve, Police Story, LA Confidential all rolled into one captivating book. Buntin nails it in the great read.
LAPD Chief William Bratton

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