The Cold Six Thousand

November 22, 1963. Vegas cop Wayne Tedrow Jr. is dispatched to Dallas on a dirty errand: clip scuzzball Wendell Durfee for shivving a mobbed up blackjack dealer. Killing a black man for six grand sickens Tedrow, an otherwise decent man who desperately yearns to be defined as wholly unlike his racist pop, an unscrupulous union leader and hate pamphlet publisher. But the Mob owns Vegas -- ergo, the Mob owns him. Minutes off the plane in Big D, Tedrow immediately senses something has gone wrong, big time. ''People walked past him. They looked sucker punched. Red eyes. Boo hoo. Women with Kleenex.'' The explanation he gets from his Dallas liaison comes with a sinister smile: ''Some kook shot the President.''

From there, it's a long, demented descent into the hell of 1960s America, both for Tedrow and readers of The Cold Six Thousand, James Ellroy's sprawling sequel to 1995's equally epic ''American Tabloid,'' and the second installment in his ''Underworld USA'' trilogy. ''Tabloid'' marked a bravura leap for the ''L.A. Confidential'' author, who jettisoned his trademark psychosexual noir but retained his penchant for interweaving plotlines and his pulpy, staccato voice. Evoking Don De Lillo's ''Libra'' and Oliver Stone's ''JFK,'' Ellroy has reconstructed the '60s not with fact, but with conspiracy theory and gossip. No sacred cows here: Ellroy's ''heroes'' are Mob foot soldiers and rogue government operatives -- the true movers and shakers. JFK, RFK, MLK: mere playthings in his hyperbolic historical playpen.

Redeeming Ellroy's mischief is his palpable anger at the hand history has dealt us. Fans don't call Ellroy ''Mad Dog'' for nothing, and ''Tabloid'' found him blending bark and bite with blistering ferocity. The bad news about the sequel is that it falls a little short of equaling its masterful predecessor. Spanning the five years after JFK's assassination, ''Six Thousand'' picks up with Tedrow becoming tangentially involved in the cover-up orchestrated by ''Tabloid'' stars Ward Littell, ex-FBI agent and ex-liberal, now a self-loathing lawyer to Howard Hughes and the Mob; and Pete Bondurant, a pimp/ bagman/ shakedown artist juggling two passions: his lounge singer wife, and kicking Castro out of Cuba.

With Tedrow, these tortured, terrible men provide the narrative engines for a twisted tour of our secret history. Ellroy takes us down every dark road possible: Mob intrigue, CIA backed dope schemes, anti civil rights subversion, to name a few. It's a wild, discombobulating ride, and it's nearly impossible not to get lost, especially when it's fueled by a feverish prose style that waits for no one. Ellroy can be sadistic: Pleasure comes only to those willing to submit and trust that everything will eventually make sense, even as you're beaten senseless along the way.

The Littell and Bondurant arcs will be most satisfying to ''Tabloid'' fans; Littell's story, especially, feels like a protracted goodbye to a character whose fate was sealed long ago. But ''Six Thousand'' finds its own identity with Tedrow. Ellroy loves snaring his men in Freudian bear traps, then watching them chew themselves apart to get away, becoming monsters in the process. Tedrow may be his most hideous creation to date (have we mentioned his father issues, or his kinky sexual obsession with his stepmom?).

Convoluted? You bet. And pounded back with that concussive, violent prose, ''Six Thousand'' suffers from overkill, too. But it's history that really fails Ellroy. The Camelot years covered in ''Tabloid'' provided a ready made narrative arc; ''Six Thousand'''s five years seem less easily organized. Occasionally, you sense Ellroy spinning his wheels, relying excessively on rolling newspaper headlines and transcripts of phone calls as he waits for the next pivotal moments on the 1960s time line. Yet the center holds, and ''Six Thousand'' sustains its furious mythmaking objectives. In connecting dots both verifiable and speculative, Ellroy illuminates a through line of post Kennedy America: the shaping nature of hatred and disillusionment. Ellroy leaves us with two haunting sequences: Littell, succumbing to despair, and Tedrow, making Daddy pay for the monster he's become. ''Don't hate like Wayne Senior,'' his mother once warned him. What a country this would be if men like Tedrow had followed such advice.

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