'Perfidia' by James Ellroy is a complex and gritty novel set in Los Angeles in December 1941, just before and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The story revolves around the murder of a Japanese family, with LAPD eager to quickly solve the case amidst a backdrop of corruption, violence, and racial tensions. The book intricately weaves together a wide range of characters, both fictional and real, showcasing a historical perspective on the time period with a mix of intense plotlines and a unique, staccato writing style that sets the tone for a dark and suspenseful narrative.
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Content warnings include depictions of racial violence, police brutality, murder, and historical references to the internment of Japanese Americans.
From The Publisher:
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.
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