Royal Scandal, Hollywood Crime, Nail Salon Drama: Pajiba October 2025 Book Recommendations Superpost
What Books Are You Reading This Month?
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Books | November 3, 2025
Widespread Panic by James Ellroy
Kayleigh Donaldson returns to discuss her ongoing fascination with crime novelist James Ellroy. His novel Widespread Panic has once again captured her attention, continuing what she humorously calls her literary obsession of 2025.
The book stands out as one of Ellroy’s more compact works at 336 pages, yet it loses none of his trademark detail or grit. Its protagonist, Freddy Otash, is a recurring character from Ellroy’s Underworld USA series and a real figure from Hollywood’s murky past.
Otash, once an LAPD officer and later a notorious private investigator, earned fame as a fixer for the tabloid magazine Confidential. According to Donaldson, “If you needed a mess cleaned up or created, you called Otash.” His actions famously included an investigation of Marilyn Monroe at the request of actor Peter Lawford, sparking decades of conspiracy theories linking her to President Kennedy.
The narrative places Otash in the 1950s, mixing historical Hollywood scandal with fiction’s darker imagination. In a striking twist, Ellroy writes from the perspective of Otash in purgatory, reflecting on his deeds and moral corruption with unfiltered intensity, as if addressing a divine audience.
“I’m back on the James Ellroy train... The demon dog of crime fiction is too juicy for me to abandon.”
Author’s Summary
Kayleigh Donaldson explores James Ellroy’s Widespread Panic, a darkly comic dive into Hollywood’s secrets told through the confessional voice of one of its most infamous fixers.