The Enchanters
  • Published: 19 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529156218
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $26.00

The Enchanters

Formats & editions
Paperback
19 Nov 2024
EBook
21 Sep 2023
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Los Angeles. Summer 1962. Marilyn Monroe ODs. A B-movie starlet is kidnapped. And Freddy-O is back. This is James Ellroy at his most crazed, brilliant, provocative and profanely hilarious

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'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.
  • Published: 19 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781529156218
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $26.00
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About the author

James Ellroy

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed 'L.A. Quartet': The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz. His novel Blood's A Rover completes the magisterial 'Underworld USA Trilogy' - the first two volumes of which (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) were both Sunday Times bestsellers. His last novel Widespread Panic received wide praise, with The Times calling it 'extraordinary'.

portrait photo of James Ellroy

Also by James Ellroy

LA Confidential
Widespread Panic
This Storm
Perfidia
The L.A. Quartet
American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand
Because the Night
See all

Praise for The Enchanters

One of the great American writers of our time

Los Angeles Times

Ask me to name the best living novelist who's fierce, brave, funny, scatological, beautiful, convoluted, and paranoid . . . and it becomes simple: James Ellroy. If insanity illuminated by highly dangerous strokes of literary lightning is your thing, then Ellroy is your man

Stephen King

James Ellroy is the American Dostoyevsky

Joyce Carol Oates

Epic mashups of historical fact and filthy fantasy . . . no one does it better than Ellroy

The Times, 'Best new crime fiction for September 2023'

Truly invigorating . . . demonically riveting

Jake Kerridge, Telegraph

Nobody does crime like James Ellroy . . . One of Ellroy's best works in years

Dan Jones, Sunday Times

Highly entertaining

Irish Independent

Electrifying

Buzz Magazine

This entire book is one gleefully violent foul-mouthed research note. It’s vivid, gripping, surreal

Spectator

No one captures the nightmare that lies behind the American dream better than the unforgettable Ellroy . . . This is the master of darkness at his incomparable best — simply impossible to put down

Daily Mail

If you like conspiracy theories you’ll relish James Ellroy’s brutal, unbelievably hard-boiled take on the death of Marilyn Monroe

William Boyd, Daily Express

I enjoyed The Enchanters, James Ellroy's sleazy, scabrous riff on the death of Marilyn Monroe

Dan Jones, Mail on Sunday, Books of the Year