Los Angeles, 1962. Screen icon Marilyn Monroe has been found dead in suspicious circumstances and Freddy Otash – dubbed ‘the hellhound who held Hollywood captive’ – is on the case. So begins James Ellroy’s latest foray into the dark underbelly of the City Of Angels: a sordid tale that will implicate everyone from Frank Sinatra and British actor Peter Lawford to the king of Camelot himself, JFK.

The celebrated neo-noir author of L.A. Confidential knows how to drag Tinseltown’s darkest secrets into the light, and his rapid-fire retelling of this most famous of scandals reads like a surreal cross between Dick Tracy and A Clockwork Orange. At the centre of the tale sits Otash – a morally dubious, world-weary private investigator who will happily throw a man off a cliff one minute and wax lyrical about his hopeless, all-consuming love for Kennedy’s sister the next.

Electrifying and exhausting in equal measure, The Enchanters charges through Los Angeles’ seediest streets, uncovering a vast, well-oiled criminal network comprising of celebrities, mobsters and politicians so corrupt they’ll have QAnon conspiracy theorists fist-pumping the air and shouting “I knew it!” A wild ride of a detective novel that breathes new life into one of Hollywood’s best-known mysteries.