This Storm Av James Ellroy

'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 TIMESA 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.'Epic crime writing from a master' DAILY MAIL'Ellroy is unique. There is nobody writing this way ... Nobody has done or is doing what he is doing' BOOKMUNCH