Mob owners say sure, we'll sell you our casinos. Hughes, whose obsession with pure blood earns him the nickname 'Drac' in these pages, is hot to buy up Vegas. the main men behind the Kennedy assassination - to take the demented Howard Hughes to the cleaners. Meanwhile he plots with top mobsters Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, Sam Giancana et al.

To assuage his guilt he skims money from the mob and funnels it secretly to Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was up to his ears in the JFK killing. Now a lawyer and chief strategist for the mob, he's a poster boy for confusion, contradictions and self-doubt.

His redeeming qualities include a genuine love for his wife, Barb, a Vegas lounge singer who comes to loathe the criminal life, and loyalty to Ward Littell. A Bay of Pigs alum, Bondurant still carries the torch for La Causa. The principals include Pete Bondurant, a shrewd, hulking ex-cop turned killer and underworld operative. Perhaps the only character who emerges with much dignity is the walk-on Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King's homosexual aide, who is targeted for blackmail by the FBI (the bait: actor Sal Mineo, rendered pliable by truly ugly boy troubles in Vegas). It ends, 672 long pages later, in June 1968, five days after Robert Kennedy's murder, with a spray of blood across a window pane in Las Vegas. The Cold Six Thousand picks up where American Tabloid left off, in Dallas on Nov. And all those Vietnam-era stories about the CIA running heroin out of Southeast Asia? True, true, true. Robert Kennedy's assassination? You guessed it - conspiracy. Martin Luther King's assassination? Mob-connected white supremacists, with J. John Kennedy's assassination? Mafia, along with rogue elements of the FBI and anti-Castro Cubans steamed about the Bay of Pigs. Beginning with 1995's American Tabloid and continuing now with The Cold Six Thousand (a third novel is to follow), Ellroy has embarked on a gaudy, epic homage to the paranoid style of American politics: plots here, plots there, plots almost everywhere. Its creator, novelist James Ellroy, might fairly be described as the Tolstoy of the conspiratorial mind.

The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy