Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Best of the Month, September 2009: James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet novels chronicled a cynic's take on Los Angeles cops and robbers, carving a dark and creepy nook for the author in the world of crime fiction. With Blood's a Rover, Ellroy completes his Underworld USA trilogy, an epic reinvention of American history, politics, and corruption. This book comes out firing: Ellroy's hipster prose--inimitable for its high style and spectacular energy--snaps and surges through more than 600 pages like black electricity, shocking the gentle reader from page one. Opening with a heist scene rendered as coldly violent as anything from Sam Peckinpah's most sociopathic fantasies, the story hurls itself across an improbable crazy quilt plot, including Howard Hughes's Vegas power-play, political abuses and machinations in Hoover's FBI, and the mob's ubiquitous shadow, darkening everything from JFK's assassination to Nixon's 1968 Presidential campaign. Another audacious effort from a one-of-a-kind talent, Blood's a Rover is thrilling and exhausting, a gloriously guilty pleasure. --Jon ForoFrom Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Ellroy concludes the scorching trilogy begun with 1995's American Tabloid with a crushing bravura performance. As ever, his sentences are gems of concision, and his characters—many of whom readers will remember from The Cold Six Thousand and from American history classes—are a motley crew of grotesques often marked by an off-kilter sense of honor: stone bad-asses, in other words, though the women are stronger than the men who push the plot. The violence begins with an unsolved 1964 L.A. armored car heist that will come to have major repercussions later in the novel, as its effects ripple outward from a daring robbery into national and international affairs. There's Howard Hughes's takeover of Las Vegas, helped along by Wayne Tedrow Jr., who's working for the mob. The mob, meanwhile, is scouting casino locations in Central America and the Caribbean, and working to ensure Nixon defeats Humphrey in the 1968 election. Helping out is French-Corsican mercenary Mesplede, who first appeared in Tabloid as the shooter on the grassy knoll and who now takes under his wing Donald Crutchfield, an L.A. peeping Tom/wheelman (based, curiously, on a real-life private eye). Mesplede and Crutchfield eventually set up shop in the Dominican Republic, where the mob begins casino construction and Mesplede and Crutchfield run heroin from Haiti to raise money for their rogue nocturnal assaults on Cuba. In the middle and playing all sides against one another is FBI agent Dwight Holly, who has a direct line to a rapidly deteriorating J. Edgar Hoover (the old girl) and a tormented relationship with left-wing radical Karen Sitakis, and, later, Joan Klein, whose machinations bring the massive plot together and lead to more than one death. Though the book isn't without its faults (Crutchfield discovers a significant plot element because something told him to get out and look; Wayne's late-book transformation is too rushed), it's impossible not to read it with a sense of awe. The violence is as frequent as it is extreme, the treachery is tremendous, and the blending of cold ambition and colder political maneuvering is brazen, all of it filtered through diamond-cut prose. It's a stunning and crazy book that could only have been written by the premier lunatic of American letters. (Sept.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Views: 49
In years past, Maggie Lee has not been a fan of Valentine’s Day, but this year, the holiday has warped into its own special hell. She's stuck working at her aunt’s lingerie shop during the busiest (and cheesiest) time of the year, someone volunteered her to help with the Valentine’s Day party at her niece’s school, and there’s a hitman in town, known as the Cupid Killer. Maggie is up to her eyeballs in declarations of love, sex toys, and candy hearts, when all she really wants is to chase down leads pertaining to her missing sister. Can Maggie survive a guy with a bow and arrow, the pain in the butt parents of school kids, and a romantic proposal? Or will she succumb to her favorite fantasy? The one where she runs away with her pets. Views: 49
Photojournalist Erin Gray has seen the world through her camera. But she's never taken a snapshot of the husband and daughter she left behind years ago. After Erin suffers life-threatening injuries, she returns home to heal--with every intention of leaving again. But seeing her Texas Ranger husband with their teenage daughter begins to melt her heart. Daniel never lost faith that someday they would be reunited. Now he hopes that he and Erin can put the past behind and come together as a family forever. Views: 49
Anna Forster, in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease at only thirty-eight years old, knows that her family is doing what they believe to be best when they take her to Rosalind House, an assisted living facility. She also knows there's just one another resident her age, Luke. What she does not expect is the love that blossoms between her and Luke even as she resists her new life at Rosalind House. As her disease steals more and more of her memory, Anna fights to hold on to what she knows, including her relationship with Luke.When Eve Bennett is suddenly thrust into the role of single mother she finds herself putting her culinary training to use at Rosalind house. When she meets Anna and Luke she is moved by the bond the pair has forged. But when a tragic incident leads Anna's and Luke's families to separate them, Eve finds herself questioning what she is willing to risk to help them. Views: 49
The brand-new Patrick Gillard and Ingrid Langley mystery - Ingrid Langley isnt pleased when her husband and working partner, Patrick Gillard, late of MI5 and now with the Serious Organized Crime Agency, is sent on assignment days after the birth of their new son. A local crime provides a welcome distraction, but before long Ingrid has a bigger problem to deal with Pangborne is murdered, and all clues point to Patrick as the killer . . . Views: 49
As humanity faces extinction, Chena and Teal Trust are chosen to immigrate as part of the "Eden Project" devised by the brilliant ecologists of Pandora, a planet closely matching Earth. Once they arrive, the Trusts quickly learn the scientists don't want new blood--only raw DNA. When Chena's mother is killed, Chena and Teal vow to fight the system that killed her. (June) Views: 48
The new novel from Wales’ best-selling author—Swansea, 1941. Meryl Jones is evacuated to Carmarthen, where she falls for half-German Michael—but Michael seems to like her sister, Hari, better. Then the military police come for Michael. Meryl helps him escape, and their relationship blossoms. But, as the war ends, Meryl knows that the man she loves will have to make a fateful choice between her and her sister… Views: 48
Although generations of readers of the Little House books are familiar with Laura Ingalls Wilder's early life up through her first years of marriage to Almanzo Wilder, few know about her adult years. Going beyond previous studies, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder focuses upon Wilder's years in Missouri from 1894 to 1957. Utilizing her unpublished autobiography, letters, newspaper stories, and other documentary evidence, John E. Miller fills the gaps in Wilder's autobiographical novels and describes her sixty-three years of living in Mansfield, Missouri. As a result, the process of personal development that culminated in Wilder's writing of the novels that secured her reputation as one of America's most popular children's authors becomes evident. Views: 48
