The Chicago Tribune said, 'Ellroy is a master at juggling plot lines, using a stripped, spare noir style that hits like a cleaver but is honed like a scalpel'. The three of them must set their differences aside to unravel the conspiracy linking the novel's events. Between the two of them is Jack Vincennes, who acts as more of a celebrity than a cop, who is a technical advisor on a police television show called Badge of Honor (similar to the real-life show Dragnet) and provides tips to a scandal magazine. This earns the enmity of Wendell 'Bud' White, an intimidating enforcer with a fixation on men who abuse women. He is first and foremost a politician and a ladder climber. Edmund Exley, the son of prestigious detective Preston Exley, is a 'straight arrow' who informs on other officers in a police brutality scandal. The three protagonists are LAPD officers. It also deals with the real ' Bloody Christmas' scandal. The title refers to the scandal magazine Confidential, which is fictionalized as Hush-Hush. The story eventually encompasses organized crime, political corruption, heroin trafficking, pornography, prostitution, and Hollywood. The story follows several Los Angeles Police Department officers in the early 1950s who become embroiled in a mix of sex, corruption, and murder following a massacre at the Nite Owl coffee shop. The epigraph is 'A glory that costs everything and means nothing'- Steve Erickson. Confidential (1990) is a neo-noir novel by James Ellroy and the third of his L.A.

L.A. Noir by James Ellroy