L.A. Rex

(Riverhead Books, 320 pages)L.A. Rex, a first novel by Los Angeles homicide detective Will Beall, will feel familiar to fans of HBO’s grim The Wire or of Richard Price’s chilling sagas about urban gangs and cops. But Beall has incredibly cranked up the depravity and violence even higher.The novel, set in South Central Los Angeles, is an orgy of beatings, strangulations, slit throats, scalpings, gut shots, car jackings, rapes, drive-bys, home invasions, looting, Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, shoulder-held missiles, whores, crack zombies, heroin junkies, pornographers, rap moguls, pit bulls, blowflies, cock fights, Crips and Bloods, sleazy lawyers and brutal cops.

The best scene: a couple of cops beating some kids senseless while a boom box blasts a rap song about police brutality.

It’s as if Beall felt compelled to squeeze all the ugliness he’s seen in his years on the streets into one book — and then throw in every creepy, violent idea he could dream up.

It all rushes at the reader at a ferocious pace that will leave you feeling exhausted and more than a little dirty.

The convoluted, wildly unlikely plot revolves around a rookie police officer named Ben, his honest but brutal partner, a Dirty Harry type named Marquez, and their crusade to bring down a pair of dirty cops. Along the way, they get tangled up with street gangs, a neo-Nazi motorcycle club, corrupt internal affairs officers, an up-from-the-gutter rap mogul and his pet cheetah, and a whole lot of officer-involved shootings.

By the slam-bang ending, there is so much going on that some loose ends never do get tied up.

Meanwhile, each of the main characters has an involved back story, and Beall jumps back and forth between the past and the present so wildly that you have to pay close attention or risk getting lost.

But the book does have one saving grace: Beall can really write, the prose at once vivid and rhythmic, the rich detail capturing the feel of the streets.

“A dozen DP reputables were throwing bones in a friendly driveway mid-block. You could tell the game had been going a while by the ducats on the deck, some of the players using spare mags as paperweights to hold down their winnings. Typical street craps; the dice were almost secondary, lost in a trading-floor cacophony of hedges and bets. The money changed hands in a blur, winners holding the bills pimp-style, fanned like peacock feathers in their palms.”

Here and there, the writing is so thick with the latest street jargon that it will be hard-going for the uninitiated. Street talk evolves so quickly that some passages may be barely recognisable as English in ten years.

Beall is talented but undisciplined — a writer in need of a good editor who can rein in his excesses. Still, producer Scott Rudin saw enough in L.A. Rex to option it for the movies.