Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | November 3, 2025
Widespread Panic by James Ellroy
What is everyone currently reading? I'm back on the James Ellroy train.
— Kayleigh Donaldson (@ceilidhann.bsky.social) October 13, 2025 at 9:20 PM
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What’s that? Kayleigh read another James Ellroy book? Well, I for one am shocked to hear that. Yes, Ellroy has been my main literary obsession of 2025, and I don’t plan on dropping him any time soon. The demon dog of crime fiction is too juicy for me to abandon, even if he is a genuine weirdo.
Widespread Panic is shockingly short by Ellroy standards - my edition was a spritely 336 pages - but certainly not sparse on details. The protagonist is Freddy Otash, a familiar face from his Underworld USA series and a fascinating figure in Hollywood history. A former LAPD officer and private investigator, Otash was notorious as a fixer and researcher for the tabloid magazine Confidential. If you needed a mess cleaned up or created, you called Otash. Most notably, he was hired by Peter Lawford to investigate Marilyn Monroe, which led to decades of conspiracies about her involvement in JFK’s life.
So far, so Ellroy. Widespread Panic details his seedy work in the early ’50s, as he rubs shoulders and punches the faces of Tinseltown’s finest. Where this one differs from prior Ellroy works is in its unexpected jaunt into the speculative. Otash is narrating this story from purgatory, offering a no-holds-barred monologue of his life and crimes to a hopefully forgiving higher force. Otash also tells his story as if it’s an endless series of gossip headlines. Cue lots of alliteration and flash-bang rat-a-tat-tat conversations. It might be the most Ellroy-esque of his work that I’ve read, so committed to stylized surrealism and pure Hollywood razzle dazzle that it’s often exhausting. But this is the story of a man whose business was in spinning drama. Why wouldn’t he tell his own tale with the verve of a libelous column? Widespread Panic was no American Tabloid, but I was won over by its dizzying and overheated agenda. The sequel delves into Marilyn Monroe. This could be intriguing.
Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie
So hey, did you hear about this guy, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor? He used to be a prince but he’s now being evicted from his house by his older brother because he’s a total creep, liar, and scammer. The past week has seen some of the most shocking and dramatic changes to the British Royal family in decades, perhaps even longer. A prince was stripped of his title because he’s an accused sex criminal and unashamed friend of a dead paedophile. Nobody saw this coming. Well, maybe Andrew Lownie did. The historian received a lot of flack earlier this year when he released Entitled, a deep dive into the former Duke of York’s life, arrogance, and business practices. What was written off as scurrilous gossip now feels prophetic.
Nobody ever liked Andrew when he was a prince, but Entitled still felt like a shock with how detailed it was in its exposure of this fact. The favourite child of the late Queen Elizabeth II, Lownie’s portrait is that of a puerile and spoiled brat who is a total charisma vacuum with empty space where his brain should be. It’s possible that he never experienced a shred of accountability until the Jeffrey Epstein story broke and Andrew embarrassed himself with that Newsnight interview. From his earliest days through to his time in the Navy and his suspicious tenure as a trade envoy for the UK, Andrew seems to have lived his life as though he was anointed by God (which he sort of was given that the monarchy is dictated by that concept.)
Lownie also focuses on Sarah Ferguson, Andrew’s ex-wife and his closest confidante. The pair are shown to be birds of a feather: greedy, stupid, naïve, and, yes, entitled. Fergie fell from grace with that notorious toe-sucking saga, but she’s also a comeback queen who milked her Duchess title for decades to make money, only to fritter it away with an unmanageable lifestyle and unwillingness to pay people for their services. She was also very close to Epstein, with her name and contact numbers appearing more frequently in his infamous book than Andrew’s.
Some details may seem needlessly invasive - do we really need to know the age at which Andrew lost his virginity? - but Lownie’s merciless takedown of these scammers feels ahead of the curve. It took the royals too long to cut Andrew loose, and it took the press longer to come around to the notion of holding the monarchy accountable than the public. Lownie, by his own admission, is a monarchist who has become jaded by the institution following his research and subsequent interviews. Amid the Andrew drama, he was on a lot of TV shows, letting the world know that the Epstein story is only the tip of the iceberg. The sleaze goes further. Read this one to take note of stuff that’ll probably become headline news in the coming months.
Death in a Strange Country by Donna Leon
Sometimes, you want to read a crime novel with a scenic setting. What could be more perfect than Venice, the legendarily beautiful city that is often the subject of cultural portrayals of rot and sleaze? Donna Leon’s long-running series (33 books and counting) follows Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice Police and the many crimes that litter the canals of his city. This series was recommended to me as a fan of Louise Penny and I see the parallels. Both series are focused on detectives who are inherently good men fighting a broken system and who have great wives who don’t spend every scene lamenting the hard-knock life of a cop’s spouse. Both also have a coziness to them that conceals heavy themes of corruption, organized crime, and bigotry.
In the second book in the series (this is still pretty new to me), Brunetti is called upon to investigate the stabbing of a young American man. It looks like a random mugging but Brunetti has suspicions, especially once he discovers that the deceased worked on the nearby American army base. His boss, local business leaders, and even his father-in-law want Brunetti to leave this case alone. How deep does it go?
With these long-running series, formula is typically the name of the game. Audiences want to stick with certain characters through thick and thin, and enjoy the changes around them. There are exceptions, of course. One of the reasons I’m so devoted to Armand Gamache is because of how his intrinsic goodness does not change but is forever challenged in ways that change him. I’m only two books into the Brunetti series, so I have no idea how things evolve, but I like this formula so far. This is a protagonist I want to spend time with, in a city that is fascinating and seems ripe for crime fiction. Luckily for me, I’ve got 30 more books to check out.
Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa
This is an excellent book.
— Kayleigh Donaldson (@ceilidhann.bsky.social) November 2, 2025 at 9:46 AM
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Ning used to be a boxer. Now, she runs a nail salon. To her customers, she is Susan. All of the women who work there are Susan, interchangeable Asian manicurists who listen to their customers’ woes and offer a kind ear to their drama. It’s a living. For Ning, this cloistered space of the nail salon forces her to confront her conflicted feelings about her place in life.
Souvankham Thammavongsa is a Laotian-Canadian author who wrote one of my favourite short story collections, How to Pronounce Knife. This is her debut novel, although you wouldn’t know it given the immense confidence of this narrative. Vast in emotional scope, this is a story defined by crisp, economic prose where not one word is wasted. Ning leads a rich internal life that seems at odds with the simplicity of her work as one of many immigrant women in an industry where their job is to be simultaneously a sounding board for customers’ emotional vomit and a silent laborer. Left to the margins by society, she and her fellow workers form their own tangled dynamics and views on life.
I was so taken by Pick a Colour and the rich shades it brought to what seemed like a limited narrative. She explores so much within these boundaries, allowing Ning a vibrant internal life that reveals so much about the intersections of race, gender, labour, and otherness. I wanted more, but only because what Thammavongsa offered was so layered and lived-in. If this is her debut novel, imagine how much better she’s going to get with the next one!
