Perfidia [Paperback]

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.“A powerful roar of a story. . . . Wickedly elaborate, its plotting brilliant. . . . Kudos to Ellroy for elevating the crime genre.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Pure, unadulterated Ellroy and a darkly compelling deconstruction of the recent American past. . . .Perfidiashows us the war on the home front as we have never seen it before.” —The Washington Post
 
“[The first L.A. Quartet] made Ellroy America’s best crime novelist. . . . Perfidia represents new depth, scope, and craftsmanship in [his] canon. It is his finest work.” —Austin Chronicle
 
“Ellroy successfully spins a drug-alcohol-and-nefarious-deeds-fueled wartime web of double-dealing betrayal, insidious activities, and gruesome atrocities. . . . . It’s tough and ugly and infuriating—and relenl£§