It's the Kennedys versus Jimmy Hoffa, Fidel Castro, and J. Edgar Hoover in this blistering, sprawling slice of Americana from the comic-book Dos Passos of our time. Jack Kennedy only wants to be president and keep getting laid; his brother Bobby, who burns with a more gemlike flame, wants to expose the mob's ties to the Teamsters' Pension Fund; Hoover wants to keep the FBI focused on American Communism rather than organized crime. As they grapple for power before and after the 1960 election, Ellroy focuses on three scoundrels caught in their conflicts. FBI agent Kemper C. Boyd becomes Hoover's man on the inside of the McClellan Committee, which Robert Kennedy's spearheading to get indictments on the mob; Boyd then allows himself to get drafted by a CIA officer who wants him to organize an anti-Castro insurgency force trained by a KKK alumnus. Boyd's friend Ward J. Littell, an FBI undercover op, vaults to the top of the Bureau ladder before a feud puts him on a collision course with Hoover. And Pete Bondurant drifts away from his regular job (procuring women and dope for Howard Hughes) to emerge as the CIA's stalwart Chicago Phantom. None of Ellroy's fictional characters, though, is the equal of his powerful, paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, the unmoved mover whose hand and voice are everywhere, even though he never appears in person. It's Hoover whose kiss-off of Ward Littell turns him into a pathetically loose cannon, and Hoover whose obsession with Castro seems to turn his coup into a godsend for the rest of the cast, providing everybody with a common scapegoat. But the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Bobby Kennedy's renewed crusade against organized crime at home, shatters the principals' fragile alliances, and they're left plotting to shake down the sexually insatiable president. Ellroy reins in the more flagrant stylistic excesses of his L.A. Quartet (White Jazz, 1992, etc.), but indulges every overripe subplot you can imagine, in this lurid, volcanic historical epic.
Pub Date: Feb. 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-40391-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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