Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins

"One of the great American writers or our time." -- Los Angeles Times "A blood poet who writes as chain saws crank, Ellroy has vigorously redefined the well-shadowed turf of contemporary crime fiction." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"An undeniably artful frenzy of violence, guilt, and unappeased self-loathing. Ellroy's crime fiction represents a high mark in the genre." --Newsday

"Ellroy rips into American culture like a chainsaw in an abbatoir." --Time

"He's forged a style uniquely his own. Energetic and abrasive, it comes at us like a speed freak. . . . The power and pull of Ellroy's writing is unmistakable." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Ellroy is the author of some of the most powerful crime novels ever written." --The New York Times

"Garrotte-tight prose. . . . [Ellroy is] a force of nature, stringing together words into barbed-wire lariats which he then uses to choke the bejesus out of you. . . . His novels are all muscle, zero fat." --Austin Chronicle

"Memorable, stunning, incisive. . . . It is possible, I think, to make the argument that in the past couple of decades, Mr. Ellroy has been the most influential writer in America." --Otto Penzler, The New York Sun

"Nobody in this generation matches the breadth and depth of James Ellroy's way with noir." --Detroit News

"Ellroy sprays declarative sentences like machine-gun bullets, blasting to kingdom come all notions of justice, heroism, and simple decency." --Entertainment Weekly

"[Ellroy] can make the night world of sleaze and street monsters come alive on the page." --St. Louis Globe-Democrat