If the way Ellroy braided Wayne Tedrow Jr.’s Vegas entanglements, Ward Littell’s double-dealing, and Pete Bondurant’s dirty ops into Dallas, Memphis, and Los Angeles hooked you, you’ll love how Libra reconstructs Lee Harvey Oswald’s path alongside shadowy handlers like Guy Banister and David Ferrie. DeLillo layers CIA cutouts, exile schemes, and mob adjacency into a crackling mosaic that scratches the same itch as Ellroy’s interlocking plots around JFK, MLK, and RFK.

If you were drawn to the backroom power plays—J. Edgar Hoover leaning on Ward Littell, the CIA’s Cuban exile games, and the Mob–Vegas nexus around Howard Hughes—in The Cold Six Thousand, Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost plunges you into the CIA’s internal battles from Bay of Pigs onward. You’ll get the same sense of high-stakes scheming and moral rot that swirls around Ellroy’s Dallas-to-Vegas corridor.

If you liked how Ellroy juggles Pete Bondurant, Ward Littell, and Wayne Tedrow Jr. across mob crews, federal offices, and intelligence fronts, The Power of the Dog delivers a similarly propulsive ensemble—DEA agent Art Keller, cartel heirs, CIA fixers, and priests with blood on their hands. Like the Dallas-to-Vegas pipeline, Winslow’s U.S.–Mexico battleground shows every faction colliding in a violent, tightly woven tapestry.

If Ward Littell’s compromises and Wayne Tedrow Jr.’s slide into morally queasy choices stuck with you, The Friends of Eddie Coyle hits the same nerve. Eddie barters names to stay out of prison while ATF agent Foley and a circle of gun-runners cut deals in smoky back rooms—echoing the survival-at-any-cost ethos that powers Ellroy’s fixers, bagmen, and snitches.

If the staccato brutality of The Cold Six Thousand—from Dallas fallout to Vegas shakedowns—pulled you in, Nineteen Seventy-Four plunges into an even darker world. Peace’s Yorkshire is rotten to the core: bent cops, predatory power brokers, and relentless violence. The mood is as grim and unflinching as Ellroy’s, with every alleyway reeking of collusion and blood.