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 themassive 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.)

The "Demon Dog of American Literature" is back, and he's barking. Yeah, Ellroy, that performance artist-cum-author, concludes his "American Underworld" trilogy (following American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) with this traffic accident of a book. It's loud, explosive, and not pretty, but you can't not look. An incident involving a milk truck and a Wells Fargo armored car is the acorn from which springs this mighty, 600-plus-page oak, which offers an encyclopedic and paranoid look at the late 1960s and early 1970s. The cops are indistinguishable from their adversaries, and there are three degrees of separation between L.A.'s back alleys and the Oval Office. The scenes bounce among Los Angeles (of course), Haiti, Chicago, and DC, and a dizzying parade of real-life figures (e.g., Sonny Liston, Giancana, and a drooling J. Edgar Hoover) put in cameo appearances. VERDICT An amalgam of supermarket tabloids and Hollywood Babylon, as edited by William S. Burroughs, and telegraphed in. On the QT, and very hush, hush, this is essential for Ellroy fans. Otherwise, Ellroy will track us down and take appropriate action. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/09.]—Bob Lunn, formerly with Kansas City P.L., MO

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. The stage is mammoth, and big-time players get to strut around on it: J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Howard Hughes, for instance, interacting to make 1968-72 so undeniably colorful. And, to some, so regrettable. No pussyfooting portraits here. 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. But it's the lesser-knowns who give this story its strength, particularly the women. 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. Joan Rosen Klein is even more emphatically left. And a shade tougher. The daughter and granddaughter of Communists, she's prepared to die for her causes and will kill for them too. Both are powerfully drawn to Dwight Holly, an FBI agent with agendas so byzantine that even Ellroy seems hard-pressed to untangle them. What Dwight lacks in clarity, however, he makes up for in bad-boy charm. The action begins with a daring, daylight Wells Fargo heist that is all meticulous planning and endless betrayals. Snakelike, it coils its venomous way through the novel. The book is repetitious in places and confusing in others. Still, you won't easily put it down. First printing of 100,000. Author tour to Boston,Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C.