The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. Volime II. Blood's a Rover: James Ellroy

'America was never innocent.'

Thus begins the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. It's James Ellroy's pop history of the 1960s, his window-peeper's view of government misconduct, his dirty trickster's take on the great events of an incendiary era. It's a tour de force of the American idiom, and an acknowledged masterpiece.

Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. RFK and MLK are dead. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Revolution brews in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'.

The American dream as Nightmare.

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz) as well as the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. He has embarked on a second L.A. Quartet, set in World War II: the first novel, Perfidia, was published in 2015; the second, This Storm, will be published in early summer 2019. He lives in Colorado.