![]() ![]() Both are powerfully drawn to Dwight Holly, an FBI agent with agendas so byzantine that even Ellroy seems hard-pressed to untangle them. ![]() The daughter and granddaughter of Communists, she’s prepared to die for her causes and will kill for them too. Joan Rosen Klein is even more emphatically left. Karen Sifakis, out of Smith and Yale, tall, striking and very tough, whose politics are unswervingly left, but who will transcend them when it matters. But it’s the lesser-knowns who give this story its strength, particularly the women. Ellroy limns a Nixon convincingly tricky, a pernicious Hoover, fatally poisoned by his own hate-mongering, and a paranoid, physically ruined husk of a Hughes, nicknamed Dracula, and kept alive by daily injections of heaven-knows-what. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Howard Hughes, for instance, interacting to make 1968-72 so undeniably colorful. ![]() ![]() The stage is mammoth, and big-time players get to strut around on it: J. Ellroy calls this third leg of “The Underworld USA Trilogy” ( American Tabloid, 1995, The Cold Six Thousand, 2001) 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. ![]()
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