Blood's a Rover

By: James Ellroy

Narrated by: Craig Wasson

Length: 26 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover's pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover's racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow - ex-cop and heroin runner - is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan - and each of them will pay "a dear and savage price to live History."

Political noir as only James Ellroy can write it - our recent past razed and fully reconstructed - Blood's A Rover is a novel of astonishing depth and scope, a massive tale of corruption and retribution, of ideals at war and the extremity of love. It is the largest and greatest work of fiction from an American master.

©2009 James Ellroy (P)2009 Random House

Critic reviews

"Ellroy concludes the scorching trilogy begun with 1995's American Tabloid with a crushing bravura performance. As ever, his sentences are gems of concision.... It's impossible not to read Blood's A Rover with a sense of awe . . . It's a stunning and crazy book that could only have been written by the premier lunatic of American letters." (Publishers Weekly)
"Ellroy calls this third leg of 'The Underworld USA Trilogy' 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.... You won't easily put it down." (Kirkus Reviews)

Magnificent.

Magnificent. Brings Cold Six Thousand to a proper conclusion. Ellroy loves Beethoven, but this is Mahler. It is certainly not for everyone, but for those it is for... wow.

Hypnotic

An enthralling read-not for the queasy, or easily shocked. I've enjoyed all of Ellroy's period thrillers, and he's out done himself this time. The only criticism I have is that you'll find yourself rewinding to listen to certain parts again- there's so much information. Craig Wasson did an excellent job with the different accents and sexes.

Superb narration

Craig Wasson once again superbly narrates James Ellroy. A perfect match of narrator to writer's style. And Ellroy's trilogy -- American Tabloid, Cold Six Thousand, and now Bloods A Rover -- in its wonderfully twisted fiction, is probably the closest to the "truth" we are going to get of American political history 1950 to mid-'70s. Certainly resonates in the current environment.

book cuts in and out

Dont buy this version of the book! it cuts in and out and skips parts of the book completely. great story but this version is bad.

Start With American Tabloid First

First of all - Craig Wasson’s performances of Ellroy’s books is nothing short of masterful. Their sympatico styles pair wonderfully.
If you’ve already read American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, jump on this title fast. Though I had previously read the two books some time had passed before I started Blood’s A Rover, so i started the trilogy again. Read back to back, the books are even better. I believe each of them stands up on their own, but the events surrounding the assassination of JFK and MLK so haunts the characters and plot, I would recommend making your way through the first two books of the trilogy first. Good shit.

An all-around masterpiece

LA Confidential and the Black Dahlia had long ago made me a James Ellroy movie fan. This book made me an Ellroy literature fan, and I have now gone back and listened to his other recorded books. The movies, as good as they are, can't do his writing justice. A unique, compelling voice meets an unbounded imagination. No wonder Michael Connelly finds ways to pay homage to Ellroy in his books. And Craig Wasson's reading is a spot-on, magnificent rendering of myriad characters. The entire production is a masterpiece.

Okay...

Not my favorite in the trilogy but okay. Awesome narration. Craig Wesson has found his calling. What was up with the random hating on Archie Bell and the Drells??? Who doesn't love "Tighten Up"?

Best Ever Narration, Not a Good Book

Both this book and Cold Six Thousand are self indulgent works by a brilliant author who has fallen in love with his subject and genre and cannot bring himself to deal with the fact that his interest in it has become a destructive addiction. Unlike LA Confidential and American Tabloid, there are zero redeeming elements to these stories about degenerates and losers that go nowhere .

Elroy is lucky that Craig Wasson narrated these books. Immensely talented guy who could provide an enjoyable experience for a listener by reading a phone book.

In my opinion Elroy is lost in his own mind and many of his artifices are more annoying than effective, such as repeating the same simple sentence subject thirty or more times in trying to bring interest to vapid pointless stories of destructive lives. Read some of the more critical comments in even the more admiring reviews, multiply by double digit number or more and you'll have a pretty good idea.

Much,much better stuff available here than these two books.

Ellroy is a magician

The Cold Six Thousand was killer good. This is even better. The man doesn't just write, he's like a dog who bites you and then the whole world changes. You'll see.

Great read

Just finished the Trilogy. Great read and fantastic narration by Craig Wasson. A great job by all involved.