James Ellroy's brazen investigator Freddy Otash returns — with Playboy's Hugh Hefner — in new novel

Alfred A. Knopf, 544 pages, $48.99

To commemorate the publication of his latest novel, James Ellroy thought it was time to come clean about his feelings regarding the 1997 film version of his “L.A. Confidential.” The prickly author was notably circumspect while director Curtis Hanson was alive, but now that he isn’t, Ellroy felt free to tell the Guardian, “The movie is about as deep as a tortilla.” He went on to say that the Oscar-winning film “wants to be a crowd pleaser and it wants to be a hard-boiled crime drama at the same time, and it doesn’t succeed at either,” which sounds about right.

Anyone interested in getting a taste of the author’s unfiltered sensibility could do worse than pick up “Red Sheet,” the third novel to feature a fictionalized version of real-life anti-hero Freddy Otash, a hard-charging, bigoted ruffian. In 1962 L.A., in the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Otash is put in charge of the LAPD’s crusade against the supposed Communist menace, a project spearheaded by then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

A murder on Halloween bears suspicious resemblance to the killings, eight years earlier, of two supposed Communists. As Otash investigates, he becomes embroiled in a typically byzantine Ellroy plot involving a dissolute Hugh Hefner, the notorious LAPD “Hat Squad” and more violence and perversity than one novel should be able to sustain. Ellroy’s jazzy, hipster language abuts a sprawling cast and a profoundly cynical political outlook, but makes for a brazen, breathless read.

The Longest Death

Kevin Jagernauth

Spiderline/House of Anansi, 296 pages, $26.99

Set in a small U.S. town called Riverton following the Second World War, “The Longest Death” focuses on Richard Cobson, an employee at Eddy & Dowd Safe Deposit Company, where most of the town stores its priceless valuables. When a new recruit at the business, Marlon Montgomery, gets close to Richard, the two conspire to steal the vault’s treasures, eventually taking on femme fatale Gloria as a third wheel. They run afoul of dogged private investigator Frank Todd, and the crime goes about as badly as one might expect it to.

Jagernauth’s decision to foreground a gay romance in a genre not typically welcoming to such characters is refreshing. Unfortunately, that subplot comes across as too Hallmark-card sentimental to be believable in the context of a hard-boiled crime novel.

The book manages to work up some authentic tension in its final third, which details the heist and its fallout, but readers may be forgiven for losing interest before the narrative reaches this point.

The Intrigue

Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Del Rey, 336 pages, $42

Mexican Canadian author Silvia Moreno-Garcia also puts a different spin on the noir tradition, setting her latest novel in 1943 Mexico. Ulises Linares, one of a succession of aliases used by the novel’s central con man, comes to the small town of Puerco Ahogado to stay at the home of Perla Inclán, the scion of a disgraced clan whom Ulises is hoping to bilk out of her remaining fortune. When Perla’s put-upon niece, Inés, discovers his scheme, she insists on being cut in, presuming her half of the money might finance an escape from her dour circumstances.

Moreno-Garcia, author of the acclaimed 2020 novel “Mexican Gothic,” understands the tropes of the genre well. Past bad behaviour looms like ghosts over the Inclán household, and the manse itself, now transformed into a guest house, is a dilapidated shell of its former self. The tenuous partnership between Ulises and Inés helps provide momentum to the plot, as does Perla’s overbearing and sanctimonious presence. Peripheral characters lend colour and convenient impediments to Ulises and Inés’s plans, while the setting feels vibrant and lived-in.

An author’s note indicates that “The Intrigue” is intended as an example of a novela costumbrista, a story that examines the local customs and behaviour of a typically rural setting. In it, Moreno-Garcia has concocted a sinuous, almost indecently entertaining melodrama.

Hot Girl Murder Club

Ashley Winstead

Minotaur, 336 pages, $25.99

It’s been 10 years since singer Scout Sage’s sister, Georgia, was murdered at an L.A. Christmas party attended by movers and shakers in the entertainment industry. Now a musical phenomenon, Scout finds herself suspected in a series of revenge murders attributed to a vigilante group known as Our Ladies of the Dark or, more colloquially, the Hot Girl Murder Club. Meanwhile, L.A. detective Grey Holloway, who has also lost a sister under nefarious circumstances, moonlights as a bottle-service girl at a local high-rollers club in an attempt to root out the person or people responsible for her sibling’s disappearance.

This strains credulity, but it’s just the first element of a multi-pronged plot that gets more convoluted and complicated the longer it goes on. As author Ashley Winstead flashes back and forth between the present and the past, secondary characters — including Grey’s older partner and a crusading investigative journalist — appear only to be summarily dispensed with in circumstances both significant and not. Grey herself dominates the narrative’s initial stages, only to disappear for long stretches before returning to a central role at the climax.

Scout superficially resembles someone like Taylor Swift, and the submerged commentary on the misogyny of the entertainment industry hits several hot buttons, but the narrative is too busy and overstuffed to be entirely effective.