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3.5 

The Enchanters

By James Ellroy
The Enchanters by James Ellroy digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • James Ellroy—Demon Dog of American Letters—goes straight to the tragic heart of 1962 Hollywood with a wild riff on the Marilyn Monroe death myth in an astonishing, behind-the-headlines crime epic.

Los Angeles, August 4, 1962. The city broils through a midsummer heat wave. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. The overhyped LAPD overreacts. Chief Bill Parker’s looking for some getback. The Monroe deal looks like a moneymaker. He calls in Freddy Otash. 

The freewheeling Freddy O: tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim “Opportunity is love.” Freddy gets to work. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe’s death and the kidnapped starlet to be a poisonous riddle that only he has the guts and the brains to untangle. We are with him as he tears through all those who block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux-sunshine of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters, and grasps for love beyond opportunity. We are with him as he tracks Marilyn Monroe’s horrific last charade through a nightmare L.A. that he served to create — and as he confronts his complicity and his own raging madness. 

It’s the Summer of ’62, baby. Freddy O’s got a hot date with history. The savage Sixties are ready to pop. It’s just a shot away.

The Enchanters is a transcendent work of American popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is a luminous psychological drama and an unparalleled thrill ride. It is, resoundingly, the great American crime novel.

16 Reviews

3.5
“1962. Jimmy Hoffa is being investigated by the Kennedys for racketeering. Hoffa hires tainted ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist Freddy Otash to dig up dirt on the K boys through Marilyn Monroe. Then Monroe is found dead, and Freddy O. finds himself in the middle of a storm of deceptions involving the LAPD, the LA County Sheriff’s Dept., the AG’s Office and the Justice department, 20th Century Fox, and a few other of LA-LA Land’s seamier denizens, and he knows that he’s a step away from being dead himself. Yes, the demon dog of crime fiction has taken on the Marilyn Monroe mystery. It’s part fact, part fiction, part phantasmagoria, and all Ellroy. Only in Hollyweird, Daddy-O!”
Thinking Face“It was kind of hard to read/get into but whenever something was revealed I was like ohhhhh. So while it was hard to understand I started to get into it halfway through and as things came together I was like where’s this gonna lead. Overall not too bad. It was a gift and I’m glad I read it.”
“I tried, I really tried. I plugged along for 150 pages, but reading this is just too much work. So much vernacular. Short punchy sentences that spin your head around. I gave up.”

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