Richard Nixon is assuming the presidency. Here the action picks up in the aftermath of the slayings of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., moves through the riots that attended the 1968 political conventions in Chicago and Miami, and sweeps into the social-unrest g ötterdämmerung of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “Blood’s a Rover” was more than eight years in the writing and follows “American Tabloid” and “The Cold Six Thousand” to conclude what is considered Ellroy’s “Underworld USA” trilogy, a retelling of recent American history from a frenzied gumshoe’s point of view. With Ellroy, Oedipus churns with Dashiell Hammett in the pulp blender. The character under discussion here is Wayne Tedrow Jr., and, as “Blood’s a Rover” begins, he’s no longer a cop but a killer and a heroin runner, and he’s just assassinated his father - his accomplice is his stepmother, who is also his lover. He rode the far-right zeitgeist and stayed in the know. Wayne Senior was jungled up all over the nut Right. The book is long, as usual, the sentences short, as ever: “He was a sergeant on the Vegas PD. Bucketloads of conspiracy theory and 600-plus pages of stripped-down prose strafing you like a machine gun. You pretty much know what you’re going to get.
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