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 & race hate grip the city & the Japanese internment begins. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men & one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police. He`s superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up & consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith
- Irish emigre, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Kay Lake is a 21-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist & the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. The investigation throws them together & 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, & Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss & 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.