When the previous volume in James Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy was first published, Harry Potter was a relatively new phenomenon, no one had heard of the Da Vinci Code, and Twilight wasn't even a gleam in Stefanie Meyer's eye. In other words, it's been a long 8 years since Ellroy left us hanging in the summer of 1968, and for the most part Blood's A Rover is worth the wait. Ellroy sums up the plots of the first two books in an opening chapter, meaning that you don't have to have read the previous volumes (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) to understand this one. The story encompasses both real and fictional political dealings that took place between 1968 and 1972, bookended by the deaths of Martin Luther King and J. Edgar Hoover. (Ellroy make tantalizing mention of the Watergate breakin, but perversely pulls his camera away before the actual event.) In the stew of real people (Hoover, Nixon, various minor historical figures) Ellroy places three men, each haunted by right-wing pasts and each drawn into the orbit of a mysterious woman who is knee-deep in subversive activities. It's a plot Ellroy has used before, but never like this. He's also never strayed this close to auytobiography, with a character, Don "Crutch" Crutchfield, whose own nasty habits mirror Ellroy's own predilictions. The novel moves at a whipcrack pace, marred only slightly by Ellroy's overuse of Beat poet-inspired language, which occasionally makes the novel a little hard to follow.