Book
The Second L.A. Quartet
This Storm
A Novel
“Stunning…Just when it seems that things couldn’t get darker, Ellroy peels back a deeper level of corruption. This obsessive, wholly satisfying probing of 20th-century American history deserves a wide readership.
New Year’s Eve 1941, war has been declared and the Japanese internment is in full swing. Los Angeles is gripped by war fever and racial hatred. Sergeant Dudley Smith of the Los Angeles Police Department is now U.S. Army Captain Smith and a budding war profiteer. He’s shacked up with Claire De Haven in Baja, Mexico, and spends his time sniffing out Fifth Column elements and hunting down a missing Japanese naval attaché. Hideo Ashida is cashing LAPD paychecks and working in the crime lab, but he knows he can’t avoid internment forever. Newly arrived U.S. Navy Lieutenant Joan Conville winds up in jail accused of vehicular homicide, but Captain William H. Parker squashes the charges and puts her on Ashida’s team. Elmer Jackson, who is assigned to the alien squad and to bodyguard Ashida, begins to develop an obsession with Kay Lake, the unconsummated object of Captain Parker’s desire.
Now, Conville and Ashida become obsessed with finding the identity of a body discovered in a mudslide. It’s a murder victim linked to an unsolved gold heist from ‘31, and they want the gold. And things really heat up when two detectives are found murdered in a notorious dope fiend hang-out.
Other books in The Second L.A. Quartet
More praise for This Storm
“Relentlessly compelling…A major literary event…A fevered secret history that could have been dreamed by nobody else.
“James Ellroy writes with raw power…Undeniably one of the most influential crime writers of our time.
“A grandiose, Wagnerian vision of wartime L.A…James Ellroy is one of America’s greatest living crime novelists.
“James Ellroy, once called ‘the American Dostoevsky’, is a great writer. His searing depictions of crime and punishment, corruption and betrayal in the L.A. police department during and after World War II are, quite simply, masterpieces…Epic crime writing from a master.
“Ellroy remains one of the most exciting literary stylists in the English language…It’s been five years since the last novel from the self-described ‘Demon Dog’ of American letters, but it’s worth the wait. Like all good jazzmen, Ellroy works very hard indeed to make his music flow so easily.
“Ellroy, master of California noir, serves up a heaping helping of mayhem…A gritty, absorbing novel that proves once again that Ellroy is the rightful heir of Chandler, Cain, and Hammett.
“Ellroy is always so good at exposing America’s savagery; his portrait of the home front on the brink of a ‘good war’ is as scathing as you’d expect.
“[A] breathtakingly complex historical police procedural…The author has created an ongoing Balzacian jigsaw puzzle that will surely attract, repel, outrage and seduce readers for years to come.
“Exciting, page-turning stuff…A portrait of life on the home front that only Ellroy, with his obsessive interest in the dark underside of the American story, could have written.
“Ellroy remains one of the most exciting literary stylists in the English language.