American Tabloid. It’s Ellroy’s most honored book. It was TIME magazine’s Novel of the Year, 1995. Ellroy the hard-boiled wunderkind became Ellroy the historical revisionist and burned all the myths per the JFK snuff to the ground. He applied reckless verisimilitude to Perfidia and This Storm and gave us the secret human infrastructure of the Japanese internment. Now — in an unprecedentedly assaultive and provocative work of fiction — he stamps “Null and Void” on the so-called “Red Scare” and all YOU hold to be sacred and true about it.

Red Sheet is an anti-communist novel. It stands foursquare in the tainted tradition of Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane. Ellroy is out to scramble your long-held perceptions and force you into a state of jumped-up disavowal.

Red Sheet scorns the mock-martyred Hollywood Ten and ballyhoos the Blacklist and the ’47-’48 HUAC hearings. Red Sheet forces you to live within the twisted and oddly tender soul of Richard M. Nixon. Red Sheet spotlights the Spanish Civil War and atrocities committed by the commie-infested International Brigade, heretofore held as heroic. Red Sheet lionizes name-naming kingpin Whittaker Chambers and bestows kudos on ratfinks Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg.

This book is no jive academic tome out to hammer home political points or espouse social ends.

It’s a turbo-torqued thrill machine from beginning to end.

L.A. Late October, ’62. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The Russkies blinked, wimped, and withdrew their ICBMs aimed at America. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears domestic communist reprisals. He orders the notably overzealous LAPD to launch a red probe. He miscalculates and names Freddy Otash the lead investigator.

The freewheeling Freddy O. Unassailably brilliant detective, commie-hater supreme, dope fiend working toward a catatonic nervous breakdown or the most apocalyptic fuck-up of his fucked-up life. Soon to improbably collide with the only woman he will ever truly love — the folk singer Judy Henske.

Freon Freddy O. Backstopped by the innovative and insensitive LAPD. Out to solve the horrific “Red Ripper” slayings and destroy a corrupt trade union that serves as the enforcement arm of CPUSA. Consoled and weirdly impeded by a wild-ass woman who’s taken him someplace he’s never been before.

Reckless verisimilitude. Radical remythologizing. Our recent past madly reconstructed. History as a state of insane ideals, misguided resolve, and near-unbearable yearning.

Bad men in love with strong women. James Ellroy at his most brilliantly unhinged.

RED SHEET ON SALE

JUNE 9, 2026

FROM ALFRED A. KNOPF