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Blood's A Rover [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

James Ellroy
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
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Book Description

Sep 22 2009
Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover’s pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover’s racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow—ex-cop and heroin runner—is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan—and each of them will pay “a dear and savage price to live History.”

Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it—our recent past razed and fully reconstructed—Blood’s A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.

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Review

“Jaw-dropping . . . A remarkable literary achievement.”
Associated Press
 
“Readers who love their noir blood-red will be giddy over Blood’s A Rover, the bang-up conclusion to James Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy . . . Ellroy’s prose is spare and riveting [and] his plot is hardball start to finish.”
USA Today

“No living crime writer so unflinchingly chronicles the darkest aspects of American history . . . In Blood’s A Rover, Ellroy reveals his keen eye for the shapes that lurk within shadows—to the best effect of his career . . . It achieves a greater depth, emotional resonance and sense of closure than his earlier books. This trilogy is a work of ambition unmatched among contemporary crime novelists.”
 —The Economist (UK)

"A conspiracy theorist's nightmare."
Time magazine

“So absorbing and satisfying that it’s exhausting . . . Every page has at least one passage that’s so snappy you want to reply it like a song.”
Seattle Times

“Revelatory . . . Twenty years ago American crime fiction seemed to have a power and a potential mainstream fiction had lost . . . With Blood’s A Rover Ellroy has finally delivered on that potential . . . [A] masterpiece.”
Independent (UK)
 
“Brilliant . . . There are no soft edges to this novel.”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
“Ellroy employs a huge cast and hyper-pulp prose to create a convincingly horrific universe run by the F.B.I., the Mob, and a host of other sinister organizations.”
The New Yorker
  
Blood’s A Rover concludes an epic fictional project that has been wild and brilliant, dazzling and funny . . . The plotting [is] fiendish and intricate.”
 —Los Angeles Times
 
“Drop-dead great . . . Ellroy does not disappoint here . . . He has built both a myth and a monument. It’ll blow your mind.”
Austin American-Statesman
 
“[This] amounts to the hit-man theory of history . . . It’s an outrageous, exhilarating, unpretty sight, and it’s ingeniously plausible.”
Boston Globe
 
“Ellroy’s bravest and most surprising novel yet.”
Times Literary Supplement (UK)

Blood’s A Rover is James Ellroy at his most devilish, hip, rambunctious and  thrilling. This is sizzling hyper noir, a stylish tour de force that will enrapture Ellroy fans and create new ones. Fasten your seatbelts before reading."  
 —Joseph Wambaugh

“Another cocktail of speculative pop-pulp fiction, conspiracy-theorist wet dreams and a beguiling alternative history. Fans will be pleased as rum punch.”
Time Out New York
 
“Revisionist history that roars off the page, Blood’s A Rover is fevered pulp fiction spiked with real nightmares . . . The principal protagonists are spectacular, vivid creations that burst to life . . . History is refracted and reflected through Ellroy’s peerless paragraphs, lending a fresh urgency and a thrilling sense of rediscovery to events thoroughly analyzed. Blood’s A Rover commands your attention from the first page . . . American fiction writing at its finest—a dexterous, astounding achievement.”
Fort Worth Star-Telegram 
 
“A crushing bravura performance . . . It’s impossible not to read Blood’s A Rover with a sense of awe . . . Stunning.”
Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Ellroy calls this third leg of ‘The Underworld USA Trilogy’ an historical romance, but it’s also very much a gangster novel, a political novel, a tragic-comedy, a poignant love story–and remarkably entertaining no matter how you slice it . . . You won’t easily put it down.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred)

About the Author

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine’s Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.

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Customer Reviews

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Most helpful customer reviews
By Len TOP 100 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Set in the late 60's and early 70's, Mr. Ellroy takes us through all the key events in American life during those years. We have the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the presidency of Richard Nixon, the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs, and the upcoming Watergate debacle. All these events are connected by the slimy, sinister Underworld. J. Edgar Hoover, also called 'the old girl," Richard Nixon, and Howard "Dracula" Hughes all appear as lesser characters in this novel. The real protagonists are their minions who both work to please their bosses and to pursue personal agendas designed to make them richer and settle old scores. The dialogue is fantastic. Like Irvine Welsh and John King, Mr. Ellroy uses the dialect of his characters to accentuate reality so that his narrative could be mistaken for typed recordings. Dialogue between J. Edgar Hoover and Dwight Holly and Holly and Richard Nixon are presented as actual transcripts. The language is fantastic. Mr. Ellroy writes of flunkies and peaceniks, light-skinned beaners and spooks, Voodoo VistaVision, black militants and hated reds, Mr. Clean, fat cats who futz, boozy hoo-haw, the snitch-file index, a shelf that shimmy-shimmed and the Peeper whose "Adam's apple did the Fug and the Peppermint Twist." This is a fantastic read.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars "CLAY LIES STILL, BUT BLOOD IS A ROVER" Jan 1 2010
By NeuroSplicer HALL OF FAME TOP 50 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, America is a lie, wrapped up in a deception, inside a thin shell of morality. And James Ellroy keeps taping that shell, testing for weak-points and showing us it is hollow. Do you have the stomach to see what they have been feeding us all this time?

DIG IT: any bootlegger's son can become the President - assassination will automatically activate sanctification. Organized crime does not exist - but that never stopped it from running the country. And elections are not easy to fix - but in any case easier to fix than the World Series.
DOCUMENT INSERT: the most powerful man fighting Communism is a cross-dressing director with a wiretap fetish - morality standards and irony galore. Dominican Republic is the new location-location-location for blackjack-tables and chorus-line girls - if el Jefe can voodoo-hex the slaves from revolting. And Tricky Dick's price is 5 million - uncontrolled scatology at no extra charge.
CAREFUL NOW: infiltrate means collaborate; collaborate means condone; condone means finance; finance means plan; plan means precipitate - at which point did the investigation turn into instigation?

This is the third installment of the American-Underbelly trilogy (the masterpiece American Tabloid being the first and the excellent The Cold Six Thousand being the second). One does not necessarily have to read them in succession - but it surely helps. This is not an easy read, the story will serpent back and eat any one of its multiple tails, more than once. A second reading is recommended. And it will up the pixel-count of the images projected. In CinemaScope and Technicolor.

As the trilogy goes, this is the weakest of the three books, mostly because Ellroy hesitated in taking up major players with his brush painting the picture. Hoover and Nixon make cameo appearances - and sprinkles cannot be as filling as a square meal. I also missed the cool tabloid excerpts. The story is dark enough, some direct humor (even of the hush-hush kind) could be used.
Other than that, expect the familiar hard-boiled noir story. Where men are complicated and cruel yet witty and dames are desirable and decisive yet in constant distress. And no one is innocent.

There be time enough to sleep. For now, let James tell you (almost) everything.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars There is such a thing as too, too terse Nov 15 2009
Format:Hardcover
I loved L.A. Confidential and White Jazz-- these had near-raw American magic, like jazz played by Mississipi delta illiterates who cannot read music notes, have no idea about scales, but are bursting with pure original something. However, beyond a certain point one must go beyond unstructured staccato scream. I mean, I'm all for declarative sentences. But three-word-sentences and three-sentenec-paragraphs can only take you so far. Even three-card-monte players occcasionally go into a longer patter. This book is good. But it could be better.
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