American Tabloid
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Narrated by:
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Christopher Lane
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By:
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James Ellroy
About this listen
We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination - in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, DC....
Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy....
Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty....
Where three renegade law-enforcement officers - a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents - are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history....
James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open.
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If you've never read a Repairman Jack novel, this is the place to begin. It's 1990. A twenty-one-year-old named Jack has dropped out of college, leaving his old life behind to build a new one in New York City. Manhattan's rough edges are jagged enough to shred any unwary newcomer, but perhaps not one who is determined to stay off the grid, at any cost, in the busiest metropolis on earth. And to do so, he'll have to take jobs of a less than legal nature.
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Fun, as long you don't think too much
- By Andrew Pollack on 01-17-14
By: F. Paul Wilson
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The Tomb
- Repairman Jack #1
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Much to the chagrin of his girlfriend, Gia, Repairman Jack doesn't deal with electronic appliances. He fixes situations for people, often putting himself in deadly danger. His latest project is recovering a stolen necklace, which carries with it an ancient curse that may unleash a horde of Bengali demons. Jack is used to danger, but this time Gia's daughter Vicky is threatened. Can Jack overcome the curse of the yellow necklace and bring Vicky safely back home?
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Pretty good story
- By Elena on 07-15-09
By: F. Paul Wilson
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The Watchman
- An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel, Book 11
- By: Robert Crais
- Narrated by: James Daniels
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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At last, the enigmatic partner of Elvis Cole (The Two Minute Rule) takes center stage in this pulse-racing thriller. When Joe Pike is charged with safeguarding a wealthy heiress, he discovers protecting the sole witness to a crime is nothing compared to protecting an LA party girl from her own self-destruction.... Larkin Conner Barkley lives like the City of Angels is hers for the taking. Then suddenly she sees another car’s metal-on-metal explosion of a terrible accident and, dazed, finds herself the single witness in a secret federal investigation.
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Joe Pike is a real person: no longer a cartoon.
- By Richard Delman on 05-05-17
By: Robert Crais
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Flood
- A Novel (Burke, Book 1)
- By: Andrew Vachss
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her - so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this thriller, Andrew Vachss's renegade private eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements.
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Noir!
- By Snoodely on 03-06-14
By: Andrew Vachss
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A Drink Before the War
- By: Dennis Lehane
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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With novels like Mystic River and Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane has dramatically altered the landscape of the crime thriller—while boldly overstepping the boundaries that have long separated mystery from literature. Now two of his sensational early novels have been combined in a single volume—two gritty and mesmerizing masterworks of suspense featuring the private eye duo of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.
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White Bread
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 06-30-12
By: Dennis Lehane
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The Tin Collectors
- By: Stephen J. Cannell
- Narrated by: Robert Lawrence
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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L.A. police detective Shane Scully comes under investigation by Internal Affairs (derisively known as "the tin collectors") after he kills his ex-partner who was one of the mayor's bodyguards. Temporarily reassigned, so that he can remain under the department's watchful eye, Scully finds that more than his badge is at stake when he is set up to take the rap in a deadly plot of corruption and conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of the LAPD.
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Police Procedural Gone Bad
- By Chip Atkinson on 02-21-18
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Gutshot Straight
- By: Lou Berney
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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When Charles "Shake" Bouchon, professional wheel man, walks out of prison after a three-year stretch for grand theft auto, he's got only two problems: he's too nice a guy for the life he's led and not nice enough for any other. So he says yes when he's asked to run a simple errand for his former boss and lover, Alexandra Ilandryan, the formidable pakhan of the Armenian mob in Los Angeles.
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A whole lotta fun.
- By Richard Delman on 04-12-12
By: Lou Berney
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No Angel
- My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels
- By: Jay Dobyns, Nils Johnson-Shelton
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Getting shot in the chest as a rookie ATF agent, bartering for machine guns, throttling down the highway at 100 miles per hour, and responding to a full-scale, bloody riot between the Hells Angels and their rivals, the Mongols - these are just a few of the high-adrenaline experiences Jay Dobyns recounts in this action-packed, hard to imagine, but true story of how he infiltrated the legendary Hells Angels.
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"I would avoid this one..."
- By Chris on 12-27-12
By: Jay Dobyns, and others
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The Fallen
- By: T. Jefferson Parker
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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My life was ordinary until three years ago when I was thrown out of a downtown hotel window. My name is Robbie Brownlaw, and I am a homicide detective for the city of San Diego. I am 29 years old. I now have synesthesia, a neurological condition where your senses get mixed up. Sometimes when people talk to me, I see their voices as colored shapes provoked by the emotions of the speakers, not by the words themselves. I have what amounts to a primitive lie detector.
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OK, but...
- By Robert E. Orlando on 01-01-14
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Why did they take out all the racist/homophobic dialogue?
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Great for those familiar with Ellroy
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Great naration
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It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans—but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins.
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Great for those familiar with Ellroy
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Pulp. Mucho Pulp. Too much pulp.
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It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans—but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins.
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Blood on the Moon
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Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can't stand music, or any loud sounds. He's got a beautiful wife, but he can't get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He's a thinking man's cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there's something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of 20 years.
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Looking for new answers
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Suicide Hill
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In disgrace after a badly handled arrest in New Orleans, Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins is assigned as a liaison officer to an FBI investigation of a series of diabolical and clever bank robberies. Three men have done their homework: they choose bank managers who are having affairs, kidnap their girlfriends, and force the managers to open the banks early.
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Try this title for a change of pace
- By Robert on 04-19-16
By: James Ellroy
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Libra
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In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.
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Narrator's Monotonous Tone Ruined Book
- By Dan in DC on 12-03-16
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Destination: Morgue!
- L.A. Tales
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Dig. The Demon Dog gets down with a new book of scenes from America’s capital of kink: Los Angeles. Fourteen pieces, some fiction, some nonfiction, all true enough to be admissible as state’s evidence, and half of it in print for the first time. And every one of them bearing the James Ellroy brand of mayhem, machismo, and hollow-nose prose.
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Noir in the 21st century
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By: James Ellroy
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Because the Night
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Three citizens are butchered during a liquor store holdup. An unstable veteran cop vanishes without a trace. Nothing connects these events except for a nagging hunch in the back of Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins' brain--a sinister foreboding that will lead him through the sin-and-sleaze playground of nighttime L.A. on the trail of a psycho psychiatrist with a talent for terror and mind-control. His gore-soaked journey through Hell will plunge this determined manhunter into the dark heart of madness--and beyond.
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A rough draft for better Noir that will come
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By: James Ellroy
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Clandestine
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Fred Underhill is a young cop on the rise in Los Angeles in the early 1950s - a town blinded to its own grime by Hollywood glitter; a society nourished by newspaper lies that wants its heroes all-American and squeaky clean. A chance to lead on a possible serial killing is all it takes to fuel Underhill's reckless ambition - and it propels him into a dangerous alliance with certain mad and unstable elements of the law enforcement hierarchy. When the case implodes with disastrous consequences, it is Fred Underhill who takes the fall. His life is in ruins, his promising future suddenly a dream of the past.
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Early Proto-Ellroy
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By: James Ellroy
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Hollywood Nocturnes
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Nobody plays accordion like Dick Contino. His skilled fingers can find beauty in even the schmaltziest Borscht Belt favorites, and with his matinee-idol looks he could be a real star. Right now, though, he’s slumming it as the headliner in a Grade Z teenybopper picture called Daddy-O. He’s too good for this movie, and finishing it is going to take him to a very dark place. Daddy-O and Dick Contino are both real, their stories dredged out of the past by James Ellroy, a master of historical crime fiction. In Dick Contino's Blues he takes us to B-List Hollywood in 1957 - a time when movies were cheerful and dirty secrets lurked just off camera.
By: James Ellroy
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Brown's Requiem
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Fritz Brown’s L.A. - and his life - are masses of contradictions, like stirring chorales sung for the dead. A less-than-spotless former cop with a drinking problem - a private-eye-cum-repo man with a taste for great music - he has been known to wallow in the grime beneath the Hollywood glitter. But Fritz Brown’s life is about to change, thanks to the appearance of a racist psycho who flashes too much cash for a golf caddie and who walked away clean from a multiple murder rap.
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it's ok
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The Other Name
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The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.
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Ear worms galore
- By ET on 10-10-23
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Underworld
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Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
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CYBEX burned into my eyes
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My Dark Places
- A True Crime Autobiography
- By: James Ellroy
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In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother--and himself.
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Haughting. I did cry. A good cry.
- By Nerda Trusty on 09-12-19
By: James Ellroy
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Stick
- By: Elmore Leonard
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After serving time for armed robbery, Ernest "Stick" Stickley is back on the outside and trying to stay legit. But it's tough staying straight in a crooked town - and Miami is a pirate's paradise, where investment fat cats and lowlife drug dealers hold hands and dance. And when a crazed player chooses Stick at random to die for another man's sins, the struggling ex-con is left with no choice but to dive right back into the game. Besides, Stick knows a good thing when he sees it....
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Can't beat this with a stick (sorry).
- By Richard Delman on 05-14-12
By: Elmore Leonard
What listeners say about American Tabloid
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Michael Gifford
- 05-30-16
Great Performance by Christopher Lane!
Ellroy at his best! Christopher Lane at his Best! If you have doubts about Audio books doing great novels justice, hit play and sit back. It will transcend you!
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- Anonymous User
- 03-04-21
nice!!!
and so it was acted and so it was written no one does it better
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- G. D. P.
- 08-11-23
Five Alarm Fire
Ellroy is one of my favorite crime novelists. This book is a really violent, profane, fascinating novel about the JFK assassination, Cuba, the Mafia, J Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, the Kennedy family, the CIA, and on and on. The story ends at noon Dallas time on 11.22.1963. It's part 1 of a trilogy; I've also read the second book (The Cold Six Thousand), which starts at noon on 11.22.1963 and is focused on the assassination aftermath and Howard Hughes, the Mafia, and Las Vegas. I will definitely read the final book in the series.
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1 person found this helpful
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- James Eckart
- 05-20-22
Excellent story and performance
This is a great book by the author of LA Confidential and other pulp stories.
The performance is slightly marred by what sounds like overdubs done at a later point in time with a different sound quality. It detracts from some of the performance, however, the other 95% is excellent.
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- S
- 03-08-24
Another killer novel.
I can't say enough good things about this book, and about the performance. The narrator renders a vast ensemble cast with incredible nuance, bringing color and character to Ellroy's protagonists, and an amazing realism to the voices of the real characters including J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, and John and Bobby Kennedy. Ellroy inflects noir cool into an already cool milieu. Kemper Boyd is a kind of ersatz James Bond, with a languid accent and a way with the ladies. But, as usual with an Ellroy tale, no one ever really gets away with their crimes. Peter Bondurant is the requisite thug, but Bondurant is a much more sophisticated character than Bud White from LA Confidential. All in all, a masterpiece of storytelling.
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- Jason Platt
- 09-24-15
Best American Mob Novel
One of my favorite books.
In my experience, I've found that you either love James Ellroy, or you detest him. He is mostly known for his sharp short prose that bounces like a dropped butchers knife on the kitchen floor.
Thanks to Oliver Stone's film JFK, it seemed that everyone and their brother was doing something on JFK's assassination in the early 1990's. New conspiracy theories were coming out like gossip in the theeatre pool; New evidence seemed to be coming out, and I'm sure that Geraldo Rivera did something on him too at some point. I remember when Quantum Leap (one of my favorite shows during that time) even did something on it. The whole topic, while interesting, became over-saturated.
But then, in 1995, James Ellroy came out with something spectacular. A fictionalized account that that spans five years, leading up to the Kennedy Assassination is better than some of the teeth gripping conspiracies that are floating around. Ellroy doesn't go off and say that "this is actually how it was done" (we'll never know that), but his story is so fleshed out and detailed, that it all seems so plausible.
In normal Ellroy style, his characters are flawed. And he, in a style that was perfected in his 1990 novel LA Confidential, he is able to span months at a time by letting us read Headlines, or Confidential Documents or Audio Transcripts that help fill in the spaces without "talking about them". It's brilliant. Because there are times that you almost feel like you're not reading a book, as much as an investigator who has either been privy to secret documents, or have broken into someones office to peek at them.
Ellroy's world is a dark one. His is a guy who will never be seen writing YA or a picture book. And it's only been in recent years that I've seen a promotional photo of him where he's seen smiling. Which is a little off setting, because -- if you've read his work -- you think that the guy must never smile. But regardless of his dark nature, there's always something intriguing about his work. And American Tabloid is a true winner.
How I like to explain the book to others is: American Tabloid is the mob movie that made the Godfather look like a fairy tale. Now they just have to make the movie.
If I had one complaint about the Unabridged Audiobook is that: I was excited to get my hands on this unabridged recording for sometime. I had a copy of the Unabridged version that was done by Books-On-Tape years ago (narrated, I believe, by Dick Hill). Christopher Lane does a fantastic job in his delivery, and even with creating the personas of the characters he's develops. My only beef is that there are moments where it seems like the producer had seamed in points that needed to be re-recorded with Dick Hill's narration. It didn't take away from my enjoyment of the audiobook, but it was noticeable to me. Like a little bit of apple skin stuck between my teeth.
But other than that, fantastic all around.
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- Patrick J. Zollo
- 06-29-19
good choice
very interesting book, enjoyed listing to it, good mix of fact and fiction. recommend it
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- Michael Harper
- 09-01-19
Great listen
James Ellroy is a master storyteller. Great performance made it more satisfying. Very well done.
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- Scott Mickulas
- 03-08-23
The best
Great story. Great narration. Buy it.
I’m going right into the sequel.
One of my favorite books
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- benjamin
- 10-11-15
Great Book, Near Perfect Audiobook
This is one of Ellroy's best novels, and an essential for anyone who enjoys hardboiled, historical or true crime. The interweaving of historical facts and persons with fictional plotlines and persons is dazzling. The '60s are as fascinatingly depicted as they have ever been.
The use of terse, poetic and often offensive language such as racist terms is par for the course for Ellroy, but despite ultimately being intended to underline the flaws of society at this oft-fondly recalled time in U.S. history, it may be shocking to someone who hasn't read Ellroy before.
The Audiobook is near perfect, but the narrator's voices and accents sometimes blend together. It seems like he was hired largely on the ability to affect the Kennedy accent and does so very well, but that voice at times bleeds into other characters and it can be puzzling. Characters who hail from vaguely similar places sound the same. Mob figures and Cubans, for example, all sound the same. J Edgar Hoover sounds like a bad Kennedy impression most of the time. Also, there are some overdubs for random lines that were clearly recorded at a different time, as they are much louder than the rest of the book and basically drop all attempt at accents and voices. Annoying, but not often enough to be a big deal. Overall a great listen, despite these flaws, and a fair unabridged treatment of a must-read.
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13 people found this helpful