[3]Ellroy's literary agent, Sobel Weber Associates, posted a brief blurb for Blood's a Rover on its website in September 2008.

These include the reappearance of Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover, FBI infiltration into militant black power groups, Mafia activity in the Dominican Republic, and "voodoo vibe in Haiti.

[8] "Document Inserts," journal entries, conversation transcripts, and redacted FBI profiles, again show character development and provide insights not readily evident in the narrative.

Character development focuses on several main characters: Dwight Chalfont "The Enforcer" Holly, Wayne Tedrow, Jr., and Donald Linscott "Crutch" Crutchfield (Don Crutchfield is a real person and private investigator, and Ellroy uses a real and fictional portrayal of him in Blood's a Rover[9][10][11][12][13][14]).

Through the evolution of the story, right-winger Holly makes a sharp move to the left, while Tedrow's search for peace and redemption are supported by his relationship with African-American Mary Beth Hazzard, whose deceased husband he had shot and killed.

In The Dallas Morning News, Preston Jones wrote, "History is refracted and reflected through Ellroy's peerless paragraphs, lending a fresh urgency and a sense of rediscovery to events thoroughly analyzed.

Blood's a Rover commands your attention from the first page and, thanks to its heft, makes reading in piecemeal fashion daunting.

And even having inhaled the previous two like a paint-huffing junkie, I sometimes felt like I was hanging on by my fingernails to keep everyone and everything straight in the big cast of characters and sprawling story that spans Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Florida, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The film was to be set in 1968 Los Angeles, with characters Dwight Holly, J. Edgar Hoover, Scotty Bennett, and Joan Rosen Klein.