Officer Freddy Underhill is 26, working out of the LAPD's Wilshire station, and chasing women in 1951 when he and his partner discover the mutilated and strangled corpse of a young secretary. The trail leads to other murders, new and old, and a beautiful crippled district attorney named Lorna Weinberg. Several familiar themes from Ellroy's other early novels (such as golf) and the majestic LA Quartet (sadistic detective Lt. Dudley Smith, his obsession with the Black Dahlia, and the Victory Motel) turn up in this, his second novel. Dialogue in _Clandestine_ is occasionally wooden and overly formal, and the novel has a tendency to club the reader with the Voice of Doom ("this had been the pivotal day of my life"; "the end of the last season of my youth"), but the plot is grippingly complicated Ellroy.
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The review of this Book prepared by David Loftus
CLANDESTINE is the second novel, published in 1982, of James Ellroy.
In 1951, Fred Underhill is a talented young cop of the L.A.P.D. who believes to have found a serial killer. He asks police lieutenant Dudley Smith for help and soon will discover the evil side of Smith, a sadistic cop ready to do anything to arrest vicious killers.
After having left the L.A.P.D., Underhill begins a redemptive trip which will last four years, until the day his past will knock at his door again.
Recommended
The review of this Book prepared by Daniel Staebler
