James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet novels chronicled a cynic’s take on Los Angeles cops and robbers, carving a dark and creepy nook for the author in the world of crime fiction. With Blood’s a Rover, Ellroy completes his Underworld USA trilogy, an epic reinvention of American history, politics, and corruption. This book comes out firing: Ellroy’s hipster prose–inimitable for its high style and spectacular energy–snaps and surges through more than 600 pages like black electricity, shocking the gentle reader from page one.

Opening with a heist scene rendered as coldly violent as anything from Sam Peckinpah’s most sociopathic fantasies, the story hurls itself across an improbable crazy quilt plot, including Howard Hughes’s Vegas power-play, political abuses and machinations in Hoover’s FBI, and the mob’s ubiquitous shadow, darkening everything from JFK’s assassination to Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign. Another audacious effort from a one-of-a-kind talent, Blood’s a Rover is thrilling and exhausting, a gloriously guilty pleasure. Read the rest of this entry »

The Lost Symbol begins with an ancient ritual, a shadowy enclave, and of course, a secret. Readers know they are in Dan Brown territory when, by the end of the first chapter, a secret within a secret is revealed. To tell too much would ruin the fun of reading this delicious thriller, so you will find no spoilers here. Suffice it to say that as with many series featuring a recurring character, there is a bit of a formula at work (one that fans will love).

Again, brilliant Harvard professor Robert Langdon finds himself in a predicament that requires his vast knowledge of symbology and superior problem-solving skills to save the day. The setting, unlike other Robert Langdon novels, is stateside, and in Brown’s hands Washington D.C. is as fascinating as Paris or Vatican City. Read the rest of this entry »

Nine Dragons starts with the murder of a Chinese shopkeeper in LA. Evidence connected to the murder makes LAPD Detective Harry Bosch suspect that triads were involved. Triads are vicious, powerful Chinese gangs, whose tentacles are everywhere, so Bosch turns to LAPD’s Asian Gangs Unit for background information on triad activity in LA, and an ethnic-Chinese detective from the AGU is assigned to help out with the case. There is some immediate friction between the Chinese detective and Bosch, so when mysterious events threaten to derail the murder investigation, it’s easy for Bosch to suspect that there’s a leak somewhere in the LAPD, probably within the AGU itself.

Connelly takes numerous threads and weaves them together to create a terrific story. The main thread, of course, is Bosch’s desperate search for his kidnapped family-member; but interwoven with that is the murder investigation that preceded the kidnapping, with Connelly doing a fine job detailing the methodical, step-by-step investigative process, including some interesting developments in forensic science. Read the rest of this entry »