Book
Red Sheet
A Novel
“At this point, Otash has effectively become Ellroy’s alter ego: voyeur, hustler, gossip broker, blackmailer and reluctant archivist of civic decay.
ON SALE JUNE 9, 2026 FROM ALFRED A. KNOPF
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Turn to the first page. Disavow what you think you know about the so-called Red Scare. This is commie malfeasance and ’60s L.A. as you’ve never read it before.
It’s late October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis has just concluded. The Russkies blinked and pulled their ICBMs out of Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy fears reprisals from seething commies. He orders a red probe and puts the LAPD on the job.
Freddy Otash is injudiciously named the lead investigating officer. He’s a stone-cold criminal with police sanction and a harrowing dope habit. He homes in on a red-front trade union. There’s a murder on Halloween night. It may link to ex-VP and current gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon and two commie snuffs from eight years back. Freddy’s overworked and overamped. He’s running the probe, and Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—Tricky Dick Nixon’s head goons—have hired him to keep Nixon away from the smear-minded press.
L.A. is coming unglued. Ex-cop/lawyer Tom Bradley is running for a city council seat and pushing the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner is along for the ride, out to exploit racial tension and peddle untold copies of his smut rag.
Red Sheet is James Ellroy’s most crazed kamikaze run and a daring, subversive work of fiction.
More praise for Red Sheet
“If you care about how power, ideology, and history operates in America, and have a strong stomach (and dark sense of humor), this is the book for you. There is no closure, no morals, no transcendence, just a thick, disgusting, ropey web of torn skin and tissue and blood and booze and jism that stains everything and liberates virtually nothing. Ellroy makes you look at it all in the glaring, blinding 3pm light of Los Angeles, knowing that it’s all just going to get hotter and more foul-smelling in the night to come.
“Ellroy excels at writing about the bad, compromised and corrupt, and he makes them resonate in the reader’s consciousness long after the story has concluded. The power of the pen is immovable in his hands.
“The genius of Ellroy is that he’s simultaneously economical and sprawling; over the course of 500 pages, he’s somehow capable of efficiently explicating the equivalent of several seasons of The Wire with a rhythmic parataxis that aims to punch the reader in the throat.