JAMES ELLROY reads from his novel PERFIDIA

Perfidia (Knopf)

Please welcome back to Skylight one of L.A.'s most iconic crime writers, James Ellroy!

The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. The United States teeters on the edge of war. The roundup of allegedly treasonous Japanese Americans is about to begin. And in L.A., a Japanese family is found dead. Murder or ritual suicide? The investigation will draw four people into a totally Ellroy-ian tangle: a brilliant Japanese American forensic chemist; an unsatisfiably adventurous young woman; one police officer based in fact (William H. "Whiskey Bill" Parker, later to become the groundbreaking chief of the LAPD), the other the product of Ellroy's inimitable imagination (Dudley Smith, arch villain of "The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz)." As their lives intertwine, we are given a story of war and of consuming romance, a searing expose of the Japanese internment, and an astonishingly detailed homicide investigation. In "Perfidia," Ellroy delves more deeply than ever before into his characters' intellectual and emotional lives. But it has the full-strength, unbridled story-telling audacity that has marked all the acclaimed work of the "Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction."

Praise for Perfidia

"Perfidia is a brilliant, breakneck ride. Nobody except James Ellroy could pull this off. He doesn't merely write--he ignites and demolishes."
--Carl Hiaasen

"A return to the scene of Ellroy's greatest success and a triumphant return to form. . . . His character portrayals have never been more nuanced or--dare we say it--sympathetic. . . . A disturbing, unforgettable, and inflammatory vision of how the men in charge respond to the threat of war. It's an ugly picture, but just try looking away."
--"Booklist", starred review

"A sprawling, uncompromising epic of crime and depravity."
--"Publishers Weekly"

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy-American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover-and the L. A. Quartet novels, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He lives in Los Angeles.