Blood's A Rover: Book summary and reviews of Blood's A Rover by James Ellroy

Blood's A Rover Summary

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 power-mongers 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.

Blood's A Rover Reviews

"Starred Review. It's a stunning and crazy book that could only have been written by the premier lunatic of American letters." - Publishers Weekly

"It's loud, explosive, and not pretty, but you can't not look...On the QT, and very hush, hush, this is essential for Ellroy fans. Otherwise, Ellroy will track us down and take appropriate action." - Library Journal

"Starred Review ... repetitious in places and confusing in others. Still, you won't easily put it down. " - Kirkus Reviews

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James Ellroy Author Biography

James Ellroy (nee Lee Earle Ellroy) was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His mother was a nurse and his father, when he did work, was an accountant, among other things.

When his parents divorced in 1954, his mother got custody and moved to El Monte (a low income area in L.A). His mother was murdered there in 1958. James Ellroy's attempt to solve this still unsolved murder was the subject of his 1996 nonfiction work My Dark Places. After his mother's death, he moved in with his father.

Ellroy claims to have been turned on to crime fiction by the Hardy Boys. At the age of ten, his father bought him Jack Webb's The Badge, a history of the LAPD. He became obsessed...

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