Perfidia
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
Los Angeles. December, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. War fever and racial hatred grip the city.
The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. LAPD captain William H. Parker is 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.
Here, Ellroy gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America’s ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured.
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James Ellroy
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels — The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz — have won numerous awards and were international bestsellers. Likewise, the novels of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy — American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. The Quartet and Trilogy are now available in Everyman’s Library editions.
2023 is Demon Dog Ellroy’s Triple Crown year. On April 21 he will be honored with the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime excellence in writing about the American West. Late this summer, the twenty-hour podcast of “James Ellroy’s American Tabloid” will drop on Audible. It will be unexpurgated, uncensored, and unabridged. Ellroy himself reads all narrative passages; noted actors read the dialogue. Boffo sound effects and jazzy period music accompany the spoken text. “James Ellroy’s American Tabloid” is a revolutionary advance for the podcast form.
Second L. A.
Second L. A. consists of two books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
