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In the shadow of Pearl Harbor, the murder of four members of a prominent Japanese family sets off a police investigation amid a frenzy of paranoia in Perfidia by James Ellroy.

Dennis Lehane on Perfidia:

Few writers, once established in the public consciousness, have changed their style as drastically as James Ellroy. In his early days, Ellroy wandered through the boneyards of 1980s pulp, channeling Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett before he found his own voice with a trilogy of contemporary novels about a troubled, racist genius cop named Lloyd Hopkins. Hopkins was morally despicable in the day-to-day, but compared with the monsters he fought in the neon-drench of underworld Los Angeles, he was quasi-­angelic. When Ellroy closed out the Hopkins trilogy with ‘Suicide Hill’ in 1986, he shuttered his interest in topical culture as well and moved into the second incarnation of his career, that of the wildly romantic yet increasingly bilious chronicler of Los Angeles in the years immediately following World War II.

Novelist James Ellroy prides himself on living in the past, and sometimes his obsessive backward gazing pays off. One lonely Saturday night a few years back, he stood at his window in the Ravenswood — the Art Deco apartment on Rossmore Avenue best known for Mae West’s longtime residency — and had a vision.

A song about betrayal evokes Los Angeles in the 1940s for the author of The Black Dahlia.

a sprawling, uncompromising epic of crime and depravity, with admirable characters few and far between.