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Return to LA Confidential: Widespread Panic, by James Ellroy, reviewed

3 July 2021

9:00 AM

3 July 2021

9:00 AM

Widespread Panic James Ellroy

Heinemann, pp.320, 20

Even by James Ellroy’s standards, the narrator of his latest novel is not a man much given to the quiet life. Freddy Otash breaks legs for Frank Sinatra. He gets Dean Martin’s pregnant Latina maid deported. He sticks the hand of someone blackmailing Liberace into a deep-fat fryer. He sleeps with the 21-year-old Elizabeth Taylor while she’s only on her second marriage.

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