James Ellroy: Perfidia, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Kurzbeschreibung

A new novel from Ellroy is always a publishing event. That Perfidia is the first volume of his 'Second L. A. Quartet' makes this publication even more exciting.

Beschreibung

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.

Rezension

" An epic and bizarrely transcendental novel that represents an extraordinary achievement by any measure The zone of Ellroy's ambition, then, is an American Comédie Humaine This is 700 pump-action pages of brutality, sex, extortion, eugenics, blackmail, back-stabbing and booze : a sustained farrago of social, moral and human chaos that makes Vice City look like a Christian folk festival The entire cast of Ellroy's city chase liquor and drugs with such savagery that, by the end, you're murmuring about how Irvine Welsh is going to have to be re-shelved with the children's books This all makes for 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

Klappentext

PERFIDIA is a grand drama set in Los Angeles during the first month of America's entry into the war, and is the first volume in Ellroy's 'Second L. A. Quartet'. Transpiring within only 24 days - December 6, 1941 through to New Year's Eve - it is a crime novel, a war novel and a historic romance, taking place in real-time and starring characters both real and fictional.