Red Sheet - by James Ellroy (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From bestselling, award-winning author James Ellroy, "the neo-noir eminence of L.A. crime fiction" (The New Yorker)--a gritty, fast-paced historical crime thriller set in 1962 Los Angeles during the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis

"The Freddy Otash novels will be mentioned . . . as some of Ellroy's best work." --NPR

It's late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The Russkies blinked and pulled their ICBMs out of Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from seething commies. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job.

Freddy Otash is injudiciously named the lead investigating officer. He's a stone-cold criminal with police sanction and a harrowing dope habit. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There's a murder on Halloween night. It may link to ex-VP and current gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and two commie snuffs from eight years back. Freddy's overworked and overamped. He's running the probe, and Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman--Tricky Dick Nixon's head goons--have hired him to keep Nixon away from the smear-minded press.

L.A. is coming unglued. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for a city council seat and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride, out to exploit racial tension and peddle untold copies of his smut rag.

Red Sheet is James Ellroy's most crazed kamikaze run and a daring, subversive work of fiction.

Review Quotes

"Whenever I start another Ellroy novel, I become a fly, buzzing ghoulishly over multiply stabbed corpses and taking refreshment from some backdoor schemer's cask-strength whiskey bottle. . . . Whenever we nominally literate corpse-eaters spread our wings over this latest Ellroyscape, our gourmet palates are pleased to retaste these affiliated cadavers both incipient and ripe." --William T. Vollmann, New York Times Book Review ("Editors' Choice")

"Red Sheet feels contemporary despite its period setting. . . . At times the novel feels like prophecy delivered through bourbon fumes. . . . The novel delivers the familiar sensation of being dragged through a hallucinated Los Angeles where politics, celebrity culture, surveillance and paranoia merge into one gigantic tabloid." --Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

"Ellroy's at his best when speaking through a secret-sharer narrator like Freddy, and this electrified tangle of fact, fiction and fever-dream pulp is his best book in a while." --Alex Pappademas, GQ

"The genius of Ellroy is that he's simultaneously economical and sprawling; over the course of 500 pages, he's somehow capable of efficiently explicating the equivalent of several seasons of The Wire with a rhythmic parataxis that aims to punch the reader in the throat." --Mark Hemingway, Washington Examiner

"Red Sheet is told in the rat-a-tat-tat style of Ellroy at his best and most engaging." --Larchmont Buzz

"Ellroy excels at writing about the bad, compromised and corrupt, and he makes them resonate in the reader's consciousness long after the story has concluded. The power of the pen is immovable in his hands." --Bookreporter.com

"Ellroy continues to expand his Los Angeles crime universe of police brutality and institutional corruption in this thriller set immediately after the Cuban missile crisis. . . . Fast-paced and fragmented, Ellroy's novel, written in kamikaze-style prose, blends real historical figures with the darkness of a noir plot." --Alta

"A head-spinning carom of a book, and a lot of fun amid all the blood and mayhem." --Kirkus Reviews

"Relentless. . . . Ellroy's dense, slang-laced prose paints a brooding portrait of a city awash in Cold War anxiety. It's a rewarding ride for noir fans." --Publishers Weekly

"As always, Ellroy's jargon is jazzy, his characters caricatures on steroids. In the late Otash adventure, readers will find themselves seduced by Ellroy's hipster take on history's seamy underside and the amped-up atmosphere in which the plausible and improbable ooze together in a head-spinning daze." --Booklist

About the Author

JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's A Rover; and the L.A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of two other Freddy Otash novels, Widespread Panic and The Enchanters. He was awarded the 2022 Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement. He lives in Colorado.