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Los Angeles crime novelist James Ellroy tells the story of how, when he was a newborn, the borzoi dog of book publisher Alfred A. Knopf visited him in the hospital and told him that he had to write a great novel to save Americans from illiteracy in the year 2009. Ellroy reads from that novel, Blood's a Rover.

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover's pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover's racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow--ex-cop and heroin runner--is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan--and each of them will pay "a dear and savage price to live History."