The intense opening of this audiobook and narrator Craig Wasson’s delivery grab listeners from the start. The story focuses on Freddy Otash, a former cop who eventually becomes a private investigator who loves doing dirty work. Otash has also worked for CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE, a Hollywood rag, where he picked up dirt on just about everyone. Now he’s telling what he knows. Wasson becomes Otash, narrating with the voice one expects from an unpolished former cop who once was as comfortable shaking down criminals as he was arresting them. Wasson also brings out the personalities of author James Ellroy’s other characters in ways listeners will remember. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

"Graphic, stunning and in many instances hilarious. . . . No punches are pulled, and no literary expense is spared."
—BookReporter

“Widespread Panic is quintessential Ellroy, but with enough alliteration, Hollyweird flavor, booze, distressed damsels, communist conspiracies, and extortion to make this the most Ellroy novel he's ever written. . . . Wildly entertaining and memorable. . . . Otash's voice is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. . . . A spiritual companion to L.A. Confidential.”
—NPR

“There is here, as in Ellroy’s other novels, so fully researched and plausible an evocation of the world about which he writes, so deft an intermingling of the real and fictional characters that the novelist asks the reader to believe that these events could have happened, and that some of them (Jack Kennedy’s exhaustive and exhausting philandering, for example) probably did. This commingling of fact and fiction is, of course, the basis upon which the myths of Hollywood, and hence, at this point, those of our broader American culture, rest.”
—Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
 
“Widespread Panic unfolds in shimmering Ellroyvision. In recounting his sinful past, Freewheeling Freddy mainlines the repetitive rhumba of his scandal sheet until it’s become the mother’s milk of his speech and psyche, and he bops to alliteration’s alluring algorithm.” 
—Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
 
“[Ellroy is] the dean of Los Angeles crime novelists. . . . You come [to Ellroy] to roll around in the blood and the mud, to ping along to the plot twists and betrayals.”
—Los Angeles Times

“If you love Ellroy, you’ll love this wild ride.” 
—The Washington Post (10 Books to read in June)

“Devious and delicious. . . . Ellroy’s total command of the jazzy, alliterative argot of the era never fails to astonish. This is a must for L.A. noir fans.” 
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Wildly flamboyant. . . . A spectacular explosion of language. For those with a taste for foul-mouthed fireworks and freeform jazz solos, both dazzling and exhausting, Ellroy is your man.”
—Booklist (starred review)

“A noirish romp through the sewage of 1950s Hollywood sleaze. . . . Entertainingly hop-headed. . . . The author [is] operating at maximum efficiency, mainlining a primo blend of over-the-top alliteration and down-in-the-gutter scandal. . . . A delirious thrill ride through the tabloid underbelly of Tinseltown. Relentlessly rabid, for those with a taste for the seamier.” 
—Kirkus Reviews

01/01/2021

In Bentley's Tom Clancy Target Acquired, Jack Ryan Jr. is on a seemingly simple stakeout in Israel when he is targeted by trained killers. Ellroy delivers Widespread Panic in his latest, which features a former cop negotiating his way through dark-and-dirty Fifties Los Angeles as a private eye. In The Maze, retired NYPD Homicide Detective John Corey answers the call to help investigate when bodies are found buried on the beach. Broadcast journalist-turned-cybersecurity expert Ali Reynolds must deal with both a serial killer and a former employee of her husband just out of prison in Jance's Unfinished Business (100,000-copy first printing). In Johansen's The Bullet, it's bad news for forensic sculptor Eve Duncan when the former wife of her beloved Joe Quinn returns with dangerous secrets (100,000-copy first printing). In Lippman's tense fantasia, novelist Gerry Andersen is trapped in bed after an accident and fears he is losing his mind when he thinks he's getting phone calls from the main character in his big-deal novel Dream Girl (200,000-copy first printing). From mega-best-selling Patterson and former President Clinton, The President's Daughter features a new family in the White House—and a former White House family targeted by an international assassin (one-million-copy first printing). Joined by Quartermous, Woods hits the Jackpot with another Teddy Fay thriller, as Teddy investigates threats to a film festival in sumptuous Macau.

The intense opening of this audiobook and narrator Craig Wasson’s delivery grab listeners from the start. The story focuses on Freddy Otash, a former cop who eventually becomes a private investigator who loves doing dirty work. Otash has also worked for CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE, a Hollywood rag, where he picked up dirt on just about everyone. Now he’s telling what he knows. Wasson becomes Otash, narrating with the voice one expects from an unpolished former cop who once was as comfortable shaking down criminals as he was arresting them. Wasson also brings out the personalities of author James Ellroy’s other characters in ways listeners will remember. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

2021-03-31
A noirish romp through the sewage of 1950s Hollywood sleaze.

This entertainingly hop-headed narrative seems to occupy a tangled place in the author’s often cross-connected oeuvre. It isn’t the anticipated third volume in his historically epic Second L.A. Quartet, the prequel series to the L.A. Quartet, which provided his popular breakthrough—particularly after L.A. Confidential (1990) inspired such a well-received movie. Instead, it expands on the material the author explored in his novella Shakedown (2012), the confessions from purgatory of a crooked cop–turned–extortionist private investigator. Those coming to this fresh will find the author operating at maximum efficiency, mainlining a primo blend of over-the-top alliteration and down-in-the-gutter scandal. The book takes the form of the post-mortem confession of Hollywood scenester Freddy Otash, narrating from what he calls “pervert purgatory” as “the hellhound who held Hollywood captive.” It was an era when scandal sheets moralized against homosexuals and communist sympathizers and where Freddy lives by a simple credo: “I’ll do anything short of murder. I’ll work for anyone but the Reds.” A good case can be made that he has violated both. His escapades find him involved with discovering the murderer of a woman who had recently been both JFK’s seductress and a proposed participant in a threesome intended to underscore Rock Hudson’s sexual bona fides. Yet any mystery, or any plot, actually, simply serves as a peg on which the author hangs the supposedly dirty laundry of his cast of dozens—Duke Wayne, Jimmy Dean (and the entire cast and crew of Rebel Without a Cause), Liberace, Elizabeth Taylor, “Bad Boy Bob Mitchum,” and “Mattress Jack” Kennedy. It’s a delirious thrill ride through the tabloid underbelly of Tinseltown, though it runs out of gas before providing much of a climax.

Relentlessly rabid, for those with a taste for the seamier.