Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Still, you won’t easily put it down.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. The book is repetitious in places and confusing in others. Snakelike, it coils its venomous way through the novel.

The action begins with a daring, daylight Wells Fargo heist that is all meticulous planning and endless betrayals. What Dwight lacks in clarity, however, he makes up for in bad-boy charm. Both are powerfully drawn to Dwight Holly, an FBI agent with agendas so byzantine that even Ellroy seems hard-pressed to untangle them. The daughter and granddaughter of Communists, she’s prepared to die for her causes and will kill for them too. Joan Rosen Klein is even more emphatically left. Karen Sifakis, out of Smith and Yale, tall, striking and very tough, whose politics are unswervingly left, but who will transcend them when it matters. But it’s the lesser-knowns who give this story its strength, particularly the women. Ellroy limns a Nixon convincingly tricky, a pernicious Hoover, fatally poisoned by his own hate-mongering, and a paranoid, physically ruined husk of a Hughes, nicknamed Dracula, and kept alive by daily injections of heaven-knows-what. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Howard Hughes, for instance, interacting to make 1968-72 so undeniably colorful. The stage is mammoth, and big-time players get to strut around on it: J.

Ellroy calls this third leg of “The Underworld USA Trilogy” ( American Tabloid, 1995, The Cold Six Thousand, 2001) 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.

Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy