Clay is a successful screenwriter, middle-aged and disaffected; he`s in LA to cast his new movie. However, this trip is anything other than professional, and he`s soon drifting through a louche and long-familiar circle a world largely populated by the band of infamous teenagers first introduced in Less Than Zero. But his debauched reverie is about to be interrupted by a violent plot for revenge and Clay`s seemingly endless proclivity for betrayal and exploitation looks set to land him somewhere darker and more ominous than ever before. `His tautest, most compulsively readable work since American Psycho. A sequel to Less Than Zero, it imagines what became of that book`s group of over-privileged, dead-eyed kids as forty-year-olds` Hari Kunzru `A murder mystery a woozy, paranoid, hallucinatory version of LA noir` Sunday Times `Brilliantly written and coolly self-aware ...Here, as in Less Than Zero, Ellis is plumbing the depths of human nature, exposing it at its worst.` Observer `The novel is a kind of modern noir and, as in Chandler, the form`s accepted master, atmosphere is king. Paranoia prevails` Independent on Sunday