Ellroy concludes the scorching trilogy begun with 1995′s American Tabloid with a crushing bravura performance. As ever, his sentences are gems of concision, and his characters—many of whom readers will remember from The Cold Six Thousand and from American history classes—are a motley crew of grotesques often marked by an off-kilter sense of honor: stone bad-asses, in other words, though the women are stronger than the men who push the plot.

The violence begins with an unsolved 1964 L.A. armored car heist that will come to have major repercussions later in the novel, as its effects ripple outward from a daring robbery into national and international affairs. There’s Howard Hughes’s takeover of Las Vegas, helped along by Wayne Tedrow Jr., who’s working for the mob. The mob, meanwhile, is scouting casino locations in Central America and the Caribbean, and working to ensure Nixon defeats Humphrey in the 1968 election. Helping out is French-Corsican mercenary Mesplede, who first appeared in Tabloid as the shooter on the grassy knoll and who now takes under his wing Donald Crutchfield, an L.A. peeping Tom/wheelman (based, curiously, on a real-life private eye). Mesplede and Crutchfield eventually set up shop in the Dominican Republic, where the mob begins casino construction and Mesplede and Crutchfield run heroin from Haiti to raise money for their rogue nocturnal assaults on Cuba. In the middle and playing all sides against one another is FBI agent Dwight Holly, who has a direct line to a rapidly deteriorating J. Edgar Hoover (“the old girl”) and a tormented relationship with left-wing radical Karen Sitakis, and, later, Joan Klein, whose machinations bring the massive plot together and lead to more than one death. Though the book isn’t without its faults (Crutchfield discovers a significant plot element because “something told him to get out and look”; Wayne’s late-book transformation is too rushed), it’s impossible not to read it with a sense of awe. The violence is as frequent as it is extreme, the treachery is tremendous, and the blending of cold ambition and colder political maneuvering is brazen, all of it filtered through diamond-cut prose. It’s a stunning and crazy book that could only have been written by the premier lunatic of American letters. (Sept.)

VJ Books is taking orders for signed 1st editions of Blood’s a Rover by James Ellroy

James Ellroy fans will find a lot to like in this gritty look at post-WWII Hollywood from Edgar-winner Kanon (Los Alamos). Ben Collier, recently returned to the U.S. from service in the Signal Corps in Europe, travels to California after his sister-in-law, Liesl, informs him that his director brother, Danny, has suffered a serious fall from a hotel window. Was it an accident or a suicide attempt? Ben arrives in time to witness his brother briefly emerge from a coma, but soon afterward Danny dies. While Liesl believes the suicide theory, Ben suspects someone pushed Danny out the window and turns amateur detective to identify the culprit. In a noirish twist, the widowed Liesl comes on to Ben. The stakes rise after Ben learns Danny was playing a part in an anticommunist crusade a congressman is launching against the film industry. Kanon perfectly balances action and introspection, while smoothly integrating such real-life figures as actress Paulette Goddard into the plot. (Sept.)

(Publisher’s Weekly, July 6)

Order your signed hardcover first edition of Stardust by Joseph Kanon at www.vjbooks.com

The current generation of Irish crime writers had something of an annus mirabilis in 2008, when John Connolly, Tana French, Ken Bruen, Declan Hughes and Ruth Dudley Edwards were all nominated for prestigious crime-writing prizes in the US and the UK. Connolly, Dudley Edwards and French all took home awards, with French a multiple-award winner, a decent haul for a relatively small group of writers, and particularly as Irish crime fiction has yet to be taken as seriously at home as it is abroad. (more…)

(Publisher’s Weekly, Feb. 9)

The 1921 rape/manslaughter trial of silent film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle provides the gritty backdrop for Atkins’s outstanding crime novel, in which Dashiell Hammett, then a Pinkerton operative living in San Francisco, plays a significant role. A wild party Arbuckle throws at San Francisco’s posh St. Francis Hotel results in tragedy after an actress, Virginia Rappe, is mysteriously injured and later dies. As the author explains in a “behind the story” introduction, the future creator of Sam Spade was actually assigned to help the defense on the Arbuckle case. With enviable ease, Atkins (Wicked City) brings to life Hammett, Arbuckle, William Randolph Hearst and other real figures of the period. Those familiar with the historical case will be impressed by how well the book meshes fact and fiction. Genre fans who enjoy the grim realism of James Ellroy‘s post-WWII Los Angeles will find a lot to like in Atkins‘s Prohibition-era San Francisco. (Apr.)

Order your signed copy of The Devil’s Garden by Ace Atkins at www.vjbooks.com today!

(www.miaminewtimes.com, Nov. 07)

Every corner of the country worth a damn seems to have a signature author painting its streets in the darkest shades on the palette – from Tony Hillerman hiking the parched Navajo desert to Dennis Lehane lurking in Boston’s grimiest allies to James Ellroy plumbing LA’s bloodiest past.

Luckily for us, no one does crime quite like Miami. And no one else has a signature queen of the thriller quite like Edna Buchanan.

Buchanan spent years on the police beat at the Miami Herald, where she (more…)