This Storm

Ellroy writes with raw power ... undeniably one of the most influential crime writers of our time` THE TIMES `a tangled fever-dream ... Ellroy offers a grandiose, Wagnerian vision of wartime LA` SUNDAY TIMES ________________________ A brilliant historical crime novel, set in Los Angeles and Mexico during the pulse-pounding aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. January, `42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They`re wrong. It`s an early-warning signal of Chaos. There`s a murderous fire and a gold heist exploding out of the past. There`s Fifth Column treason - at this moment, on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, commies and race racketeers. There`s two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with History. Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He`s a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is a PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He`s gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She`s a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core. L.A., `42. Homefront madness ascendant. Early-wartime inferno - This Storm is James Ellroy`s most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes.