The Enchanters

James Ellroy--Demon Dog of American Letters--goes straight to the tragic heart of postwar Hollywood with the story of Marilyn Monroe's untimely death, in an astonishing, ripped from the headlines crime story.

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

The freewheeling Freddy O. Ex-cop, defrocked private eye, dope fiend, and freelance extortionist. A man who lives by the maxim "Opportunity is love." Bill Parker tosses him the opportunity of a lifetime. Freddy sees dollar signs and untold glory, and runs with it. He dimly perceives Marilyn Monroe's death and the starlet's kidnapping as a poisonous confluence that only he has the will to unravel. We are with him as he ravages and exploits all those who would block his path to the truth. We are with him as he penetrates the faux sunshine surrounding Jack and Bobby Kennedy and the shuck of Camelot. We are with him as he falters and grasps for love. We are with him as he traces Marilyn Monroe's final harrowing fall into the hellish back-burner of Los Angeles that he helped create. And we are with him as confronts his own descent into madness.

The Enchanters is a transcendent work of popular fiction. It is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative, profanely hilarious, and stop-your-heart tender. It is at once a scandal-rag expos� and a gut-shot confession. It is a psychological novel of luminous depth and an unparalleled thrill ride.