Perfidia - Softcover

"There has never been a writer like James Ellroy." (Telegraph)

"An epic and bizarrely transcendental novel that represents an extraordinary achievement by any measure ... a genuinely impressive feat of sustained literary energy: 90% of novelists couldn't get anywhere near it...His is an awe-inspiring artistic vision and this is a novel that should surely be read by new readers as well as fans." (Edward Docx Guardian)

"The master of American crime fiction." (Sunday Times)

"A triumphant return to the violent fictional world where he started – 1940s Los Angeles ... Fans will not be disappointed ... It is populated by many of Ellroy’s most memorable monsters, notably LAPD Sgt Dudley Smith ... Reading it made me want to return to the original Quartet." (Evening Standard)

"James Ellroy is back doing what he does best, weaving a tangle of tales set in wartime Los Angeles...I look forward, eagerly, to the next three instalments." (The Times)

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.