James Ellroy

A debut entry in a second L.A. Quartet by the award-winning author of L.A. Confidential follows a post-Pearl Harbor murder of a Japanese family that entangles a brilliant Japanese-American forensic chemist, an adventurous woman, a future police chief and an arch villain. 75,000 first printing.

A Novel

Perfidia

Nominated for the Folio Prize It is December 6 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans - but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith - Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Kay Lake is a 21-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm centre that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls - comrades, rivals, lovers, history's pawns. Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America's ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.

Jan Jackson

A chunk. Maybe overlong, but untangling the different skeins was never going to be easy. The first of a second L.A. trilogy. A thumping book, with an army of characters, working to place themselves in the confusion of the aftermath of December the 7th, 1941, and the onset of mistrust of all things Japanese. Some of them are real, some are imagined. And some appear elsewhere in the Ellroy multiverse. Which is good. 

A graphic novel, imaged by words. Lots of words; hence, the three weeks it took me to finish. I feel I could read Ellroy for ever, going around and around, wincing at the casual brutality, sneering knowingly (but not) at the criminality of the police. On the take, and on the make. 

This one left me dazed; punched repeatedly, exhausted by a barrage of words.

Perfidia A Novel

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