James Ellroy writes like he thinks in ALL CAPS. Occasionally, he writes in ALL CAPS, too. He rages in italics, flings exclamation points like sticks of dynamite. Though he uses more alliteration than the Gawain poet, his debt is not to the Anglo-Saxon word hoard but to the neon nastiness of the tabloid headline and the violence of comic book onomatopoeia. His energy flirts with insanity and then takes it brutally to bed. No, Mr. Ellroy doesn’t do subtlety. Reading Widespread Panic, his latest outing and the third book of his Second L.A. Quartet series, is like getting hit in the mouth with a sap over and over again and then saying, through broken and bloody teeth, “This is awesome.”

A little too rare is the author of literary fiction willing to risk his readers’ displeasure on a truly vile narrator. The creepo protagonist is a staple of crime fiction, though, and it’s a specialty of Ellroy’s. Even his hero police, such as Bud White in L.A. Confidential, twist arms, crack skulls, plant drop guns, and force confessions. Freddy Otash, the ostensible hero of Widespread Panic, is fouler yet: ultraviolent, machinating, opportunistic, greedy. He’s a former “Hollyweird” officer, a private investigator whose moral compass blows where it lists, a fixer, a bagman, a pimp, and a night-stalking blackmail-happy paparazzo who invades privacy for fun and profit. He’s so bad, in fact, that when we first make his acquaintance, he’s speaking to us from Purgatory.