After completing his memoir My Dark Places, James Ellroy swore off stories of Los Angeles, the city of his childhood and the setting for so much of his fiction. But it could be argued that his post-L.A. work has simply blown the city up to the size of the world. In 1995's American Tabloid, Ellroy's version of the underside of American history bore a striking resemblance to the L.A. universe he spent his career establishing—a world populated by characters driven by want and abetted by their capacity for compromise. Tabloid, the first installment of his "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy, added ideology to the mix, an easier fit than might initially seem possible. Ellroy succinctly described his project as an attempt to portray "politics as crime," and from that notion, he created an elaborate counter-mythology for the years in which the '50s faded into the '60s. The players (organized crime, the CIA, Hughes, Hoover) and scenes (Cuba, Washington, Dallas) might have been familiar to anyone versed in alternate versions of recent history, but the author's ability to put a human face on familiar conspiracy theories lent the book a creepy plausibility. The shifting of loyalties from the FBI to organized crime to anti-Castro rebel groups seems far more believable when conducted by the men driving Ellroy's America: consummate opportunists in a world that crushes anyone who clings too tightly to ideals. Bookended by the murder of two Kennedys, The Cold Six Thousand picks up almost precisely where Tabloid left off, with Las Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow blowing into Dallas in the wake of the JFK assassination. His mission is to kill a black pimp responsible for injuring a white card dealer. Tedrow harbors reservations about the assignment, many of them tied to its all-too-apparent racial motivation, a theme that underlies much of the book. His handling of the job eventually embroils him in the machinations of Tabloid's surviving protagonists, a Mafia lawyer with slumbering liberal sympathies and a CIA-affiliated strongman who never quite got over the Bay Of Pigs. Using prose that's somehow even more telegraphic than that of Tabloid and the final "L.A. Quartet" novels, Ellroy again offers a picture of history's underside, from Vietnam to the KKK, and the forces that control it. Its only flaw is its familiarity. This is very much American Tabloid 2, and Ellroy's sweeping history, wrapped in amphetamine prose, can't help but seem less revelatory the second time around. Even so, it manages to build on its predecessor's accomplishments. Ellroy's reductive approach to language has rarely been put to better use than it is here, as he uses tight, hard-bop riffs to conjure a nightmare America enveloped ever more thoroughly in the darkness that ended Kennedy's Camelot—a darkness the author first spotted rolling in across the hills of Hollywood years ago.