Thriller

With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. With Blood’s a Rover James Ellroy finally finishes his ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. It’s been eight years since the second volume, The Cold Six Thousand, written in a staccato shorthand prose that seemed always about to veer out of control, marked the apotheosis of Ellroy’s feverish and frenetic style. Something had to give, and at first it was Ellroy himself, who suffered a breakdown and eventually quit Middle America to return to his spiritual home of Los Angeles. Reviewing The Cold Six Thousand back in 2001 I called Ellroy either our greatest obsessive writer or our most obsessive great

Ordinary Thunderstorms is a thriller with grand ambitions. It is set in contemporary London, much of the action taking place on or near the Thames. The timeless, relentless river represents the elemental forces which subvert the sophisticated but essentially temporary structures raised by modern man to showcase his ambition, ingenuity and greed. William Boyd has attempted to write a Great London Novel for our times. His clever interlocking of lives from every stratum of society echoes Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend; hit-men, asylum- seekers, prostitutes, religious charismatics, corrupt businessmen, worthless aristocrats, paedophiles, junkies, exploitative landlords — Boyd’s characters, like Dickens’s, inhabit their city like rats in the hollow walls