3.0
Perfidia
ByPublisher Description
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.
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesPerfidia Reviews
3.0
“perfidia - per•FEE•dee-ah [n.] 1. faithlessness, treachery, or betrayal. 2. a deliberate breaking of trust or loyalty, often used for severe disloyalty or deceit. Latin meaning "beyond faith,"
perfidious [adj.] perfidiously [adv.] perfidies [plural]
"The general revealed his perfidious nature when he exposed his secrets to his enemies."
"Clair knew her friend's perfidious behavior was wrong but had no idea how to stop it."
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Los Angeles / 6-7 Dec 1941
Ellroy isn’t interested in suspense so much as deterioration and decay. The murders at the center of the book matter, but they’re secondary to the larger crime: a city discovering how quickly it will abandon principle when fear walks in the door.
Ellroy reconstructs wartime Los Angeles with brutal specificity — police files, bureaucratic memos, racial paranoia, internal monologue sharpened to a blade. Japanese American characters are immediately suspect; officials scramble to position themselves; alliances form around survival. The procedural elements function almost as camouflage for the real plot, which is how ambition, racism, and institutional power metastasize overnight.
What makes Perfidia especially bleak is its historical certainty. There is no mystery about whether the internment camps will happen, whether careers will be built on false confessions, whether the machinery of the state will grind forward. Ellroy treats history not as backdrop but as evidence already a fait accompli.
The title says everything. This is a novel about betrayal — personal, civic, racial — unfolding so quickly it feels less like a descent than a door quietly closing behind everyone involved. This isn't my preferred style with it's bleak abrasive style.”
About James Ellroy
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the L.A. Quartet: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz, and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. These seven novels have won numerous honors and were international best sellers.
Perfidia is the first novel of the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy’s fictional history of Los Angeles during World War II. The design of this extended work is unprecedented. Ellroy will take characters from the original quartet and trilogy, set between 1946 and 1972, and detail their lives as significantly younger people. Ellroy currently lives in Los Angeles.
www.jamesellroy.net
Perfidia is the first novel of the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy’s fictional history of Los Angeles during World War II. The design of this extended work is unprecedented. Ellroy will take characters from the original quartet and trilogy, set between 1946 and 1972, and detail their lives as significantly younger people. Ellroy currently lives in Los Angeles.
www.jamesellroy.net
Other books by James Ellroy
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