Perfidia, English edition - A Novel

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

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 Department. 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. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center 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.

From the Hardcover edition.

Report

"Perfidia is a brilliant, breakneck ride. Nobody except James Ellroy could pull this off. He doesn't merely write-he ignites and demolishes."
-Carl Hiaasen

"[Ellroy's] style-jumpy, feverish, and anarchic-mirrors the world we enter. . . . The police are not knights, they're occupiers, and in Perfidia, Ellroy comes closer than ever to making the case that he writes alt-histories not of the Los Angeles police but of the Los Angeles police state. . . . [He] depicts with frightening authenticity how those innocent of crimes are knowingly framed in the interest of the almighty 'greater good'."
-Dennis Lehane, The New York Times Book Review

"The unmistakable product of James Ellroy's fevered imagination. . . . Perfidia shows us the war on the home front as we have never seen it before. The result is both pure, unadulterated Ellroy and a darkly compelling deconstruction of the recent American past. . . . [It's] written in a familiar staccato style that delivers large amounts of information in extremely compressed form. The violence, which is frequent and horrific, is described with a clinical exactitude that never flinches. And the entire enterprise is colored by an instantly recognizable tabloid sensibility. . . . Like it or not, believe in it or not, this is James Ellroy's America, and it is a savage, often frightening place."
-Bill Sheehan, The Washington Post

"Ellroy successfully spins a drug-alcohol-and-nefarious-deeds-fueled wartime web of double-dealing betrayal, insidious activities, and gruesome atrocities. . . . . It's tough and ugly and infuriating-and relentlessly readable. . . . [His] often-staccato prose is as jumpy as the time period and the fact that we see or hear about the same incidents from different-and differing-viewpoints enhances that sense of unease and distortion. But the narrative is tautly held together by the ongoing police procedural and by several primary characters."
-Daneet Steffens, The Boston Globe

"A powerful roar of a story with wonderfully flawed characters and a richly conceived plot that will keep you turning every last one of its 700 pages. . . . This stunning novel resonates throughout with the dark vibe of noir. . . . The story is wickedly elaborate, its plotting brilliant. . . . Kudos to Ellroy for elevating the crime genre with this raucous, sprawling, political beast."
-Zoë Ferraris, San Francisco Chronicle

"[The first L.A. Quartet] made Ellroy America's best crime novelist, a terse, staccato, Bukowskian demimonde poet. . . . Perfidia represents new depth, scope, and craftsmanship in James Ellroy's canon. It is his finest work. You'll wonder how he can top it."
-Tim Stegall, Austin Chronicle

"A historical novel, stippled with authentic details of that not-very-innocent era, disguised as a first-rate mystery novel."
-Fred Grimm, The Miami Herald

"It is welcome news that Ellroy's latest effort, Perfidia, returns home, sliding in as a prequel to the L.A. Quartet, set in the previous decade. Ellroy's revisionist impulse is to complicate the patriotic unity of the wartime years much as he undid the myth of placid postwar Los Angeles. . . . What lies ahead, as Ellroy presses deeper into the war years, is anyone's guess, but like his protagonists, he is driven by a paradoxical obsession: to keep on digging up dark memories of the city, in the hope of rising above the psychic traumas of the past-not reborn, but newly wise."
-Saul Austerlitz, The Atlantic

"If Ellroy's bitter visions entice you, Perfidia will take you once again to the underbelly of American history. . . . You will dive into Perfidia with a shiver that is equal parts anticipation and fear-because you know it's going to get very dark very fast. . . . Ellroy's singular style has been described as jazzlike or telegraphic; here it is insomniac, hallucinogenic, nightmarish."
-Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

"Big, brash and overpowering, this will appeal to fans of Ellroy's terse, lurid style."
-Ran

Product details

• Authors: James Ellroy
• Publisher: Penguin Random House
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.03.2015
• EAN: 9781101872994
• ISBN: 978-1-101-87299-4
• No. of pages: 720
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 204 mm x 31 mm
• Weight: 518 g
• Series: Second LA Quartet
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature