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)

Unlistenable.

I tried to attend to the short staccato sentences that didn't seem related to each other. There's no character development, just a long list of facts about a person or place. One unsavory character ran into another, without any discernment or voice change. I was also turned off by the liberal use of racial epithets and mindless lists of events. The writing was like listening to a technical manual, very dry, no emotional flavoring, except the bravado of puffed up thugs. I'd give this title a zero but that wasn't an option. I admit that I had to stop listening after two hours. That's a first for me.

too much to handle

What would have made Blood's a Rover better?

The bombardment of slang is too much if you are not familiar with these terms. It might be a better book to read so you have time to absorb and analyze what was just said, but in this form it is just too much for me to follow without getting a headache.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

The manipulation of our lives and politics that this story develops is just too far out to be believable unless you subscribe to conspiracy theorists.

Sucks

Makes no sense at all. Must have been written while taking LSD

Very nice

A bit long but very good.

Never even listened to this

Listened to the first couple of pages of another Ellroy book and could not stand it! Too choppy! I love Craig Wasson's voice, but felt it was wasted on this book.

Couldn't get into it.

I have been listening to an average of 40 audiobooks each of the last 5 years. This is only the 2nd I quit listening to. Average sentence length was about 5 words. Just couldn't follow it. Maybe it is one of those books that is best read.

trash literature

This book is not worthy to be proclaimed as literature. The writing is jerky, unconnected and entirely without merit. Further, the language and references in the book are gender, religion and race denigrating. I wasted my money on this book and would not recommend it to anyone.

Blah

I bought this audiobook because Stephen King highly recommended it, and my wife and I are fans of his. I tried listening to this two times and never could make it past about the four-hour mark. Super boring, narrator sucked, story was very dis-jointed.