Perfidia

von James Ellroy

It is December 6, 1941, in Los Angeles. World War II has raged for two years in Great Britain and Europe. Japan has gone on a rampage in Asia and the Pacific - and America's entrance into the war is a widely accepted and utterly foregone conclusion. Los Angeles is mainland America's gateway to the Pacific conflict, home to the largest Japanese community in the United States. Bomber squadrons of the Imperial Japanese Air Corps will attack the U.S. fleet moored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, within 24 hours. That catastrophic moment in U.S. history will be preceded by the murders or ritual suicides of a Japanese family in L.A., a scant dozen hours earlier. Massive roundups of suspected Japanese subversives will soon begin; racial hysteria will overtake L.A. The stage has been set for James Ellroy's largest, most historically dense and factually detailed novel - and the first book in his 'Second L.A. Quartet' - PERFIDIA.

Perfidia is an epic-length novel that will transpire within only 24 days - December 6, 1941 through to New Year's Eve. A crime novel, a war novel and a historic romance, it will unfold in real time as two police officers, a Japanese-American forensic chemist and a young woman coerced into a cabal of Hollywood leftists work around the clock, while Los Angeles comports under nighttime blackouts, war fever and escalating racial tension spawned by the Pearl Harbor bombings.

Characters from Ellroy's previous seven novels - including arch villain Dudley Smith, anti-hero of The Big Nowhere, White Jazz and L.A. Confidential - will be joined by new characters - both real-life and fictional - in this grand drama of Los Angeles during the first month of America's entry into the war.