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. (amazon)

Fairly disappointing Ellroy. Still an exhilirating ride, but the pay-off was very unsatisfying. This is the conclusion to his American Tabloid trilogy. The first part was based around the assassination of JFK, and the second around those of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Ellroy, justifiably, decided not to cover the Watergate scandal in the third volume, but that left no comparable historic events to anchor this book, making it feel a far less significant work. This sadly drags down the two preceding tomes by association and leads to the question of whether he should have bothered making the series into a trilogy.

All of the major mysteries - set up in the early part of the book, and driving much of the plot throughout - fizzle out into perfunctory and largely unbelievable (even by Ellroy standards) conclusions. It really felt like he hadn't plotted the book fully enough and ended up writing himself into a corner. If he had been using them just to drive along the plot he really shouldn't have built them up so much.

It's a shame, because the Ellroy roller-coaster or misanthropy does still deliver. And he has curbed some of his more annoying tics, while maintaining his kinetic, punchy prose. His conflicted and compromised anti-heroes are still compelling (although his propensity to kill his characters off - while admirably shocking - does mean that you feel seen his archetypes several times before), and the hallucinatory passages, particularly in Haiti, are immersive. He still delivers a convincing vision of a familiar world refracted through a prism of violence, fear and hate. Perhaps best of all, he introduces a young and ingenuous (as far as an Ellroy character can be) character that seems to have a lot of the young and wayward Ellroy, and hence feels particularly believable. I would like to read more about him.

Unfortunately, by the end of what should have been the crowning work of an impressive and challenging trilogy, I felt that Ellroy had over-indulged himself, and perhaps believed his own hype a little too much.
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Found this secondhand and hadn't read the previous two books, so I was a bit lost at first, but this still definitely works as a standalone novel. Can't really say much more without having read the rest of the trilogy, but to my mind this was very different to the Ellroy I've read before, with a lot more in the way of international intrigue, conspiracy, sorcery and general political skullduggery, whilst still oozing noir attitude and immersing you in the dank underbellies of the cities it's set in - primarily LA, but there are some more exotic locales as well.

Might shock or open a few wounds for some readers, given its basis in modern history and its utter refusal to pull any punches as far as I could see, but for those who can stomach all that it's an interesting read on multiple levels. ( )

Not for the fainthearted. Brutal but pretty damn great. ( )

2010 SJordi