Perfidia
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4.7 • 11 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'There has never been a writer like James Ellroy.' Telegraph
Los Angeles, December 6, 1941. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. War fever and race hate grip the city and the internment of Japanese-Americans begins.
Following the hellish murder of a Japanese family, three men and one woman are summoned. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith - Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer and fledgling war profiteer. Kay Lake is a 21-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. Hideo Ashida is a brilliant police chemist and the only Japanese on the payroll.
Four driven souls - rivals, lovers, history's pawns - thrown into an investigation which will not only rip them apart but take America to the edge of the abyss at a crucial moment in its history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ellroy launches his second L.A. Quartet with a sprawling, uncompromising epic of crime and depravity, with admirable characters few and far between. The action spans about three weeks during December 1941, opening the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with the deaths of four members of the Watanabe family, who were possibly victims of a ritual murder-suicide. A note left at the scene written in Japanese, disclaiming responsibility for a "looming apocalypse," suggests foreknowledge of the attack. The investigation and its ramifications are explored from the perspectives of the LAPD's Japanese crime-scene specialist Hideo Ashida; William Parker, the future LAPD head; and two figures familiar from Ellroy's earlier books Dudley Smith, a murderous and bent cop, and the enigmatic Kay Lake, who's roped into going undercover in L.A.'s communist community. Cynical schemes to profit from the planned internment of the Japanese may have played a part in the killings as well. This is as good a sample of Ellroy as any for newcomers, and old hands will find new perspectives on old characters intriguing. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
Just Brilliant
Just brilliant...the Demon Dog writes big and loud.
Nothing new here
For those unfamiliar with the Ellroy oeuvre (have you been living under a rock), he writes historical crime fiction that is the noirest noir going around, and runs to 15 novels and 6 collections of short stories.
All Mr Ellroy's novels are long, densely plotted, pessimistic about the human condition, prone to moralising, and include real life events and persons. They also display remarkable prescience about the world's political future. And violent. Let's not forget violent.
Best known is the LA Quartet set in post-war LA: The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988), LA Confidential (1990), and White Jazz (1992).
LA Confidential was made into a very successful 1997 movie that kickstarted the US careers of Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce.
After that came the Underworld USA Trilogy - American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood's A Rover (2009) - in which Mr Ellroy expands his horizons to include the whole country, starting five years before, and finishing ten years after, the assassination of Jack Kennedy.
The first offering in the second LA Quartet, which are prequels to the first, is Perfidia (2014). The action starts in with the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and unfolds over little more than 3 weeks rather than the years of his earlier work. Familiar characters reappear. Familiar tropes ditto. The plight of Japanese Americans in wartime is addressed.
In an age where female writers dominate published fiction - entirely appropriate considering they read a heck of a lot more fiction than men - this is intensely masculine prose, the author's idiosynchratic telegrammatic style characterised by short, staccato sentences and eschewing connecting words.
There's no one quite like James Ellroy. However, for someone like me who has read most of his work, there's nothing new to see, which is why I rate the original LA Quartet higher.