Red Sheet

<p><b>'One of the great American writers of our time. </b><i>LOS ANGELES TIMES</i><br><b> Fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted, and paranoid. </b> STEPHEN KING<br><b> The American Dostoyevsky. </b> JOYCE CAROL OATES<br><b> The neo-noir eminence of L.A. crime fiction. </b><i>THE NEW YORKER</i><br><b> Fast, punchy, telegrammatic prose that demands to be read quickly and that flows like an enraged river. </b><i>NPR</i><br><br>Turn to the first page. Disavow what you <i>think</i> you know about the so-called Red Scare. This is commie malfeasance and 60s L.A. as you ve never read it before.<br><br>It s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The Russkies blinked and pulled their ICBMs out of Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from commies. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job.<br><br>Freddy Otash is injudiciously named the lead investigating officer. He s a stone-cold criminal with police sanction and a harrowing dope habit. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There s a murder on Halloween night. It may link to ex-VP and current gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and two commie snuffs from eight years back. Freddy s overworked and overamped. He s running the probe, and Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman Tricky Dick Nixon s head goons have hired him to keep Nixon away from the smear-minded press.<br><br>L.A. is coming unglued. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for a city council seat and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride, out to exploit racial tension <i>and</i> peddle untold copies of his dirty rag.<br><br>RED SHEET is James Ellroy s most crazed kamikaze run and a daring, subversive work of fiction.</p>