Fed up of Ellroy's style; highly self-derivative, some scenes actually identical to ones in LA Confidential; even down to the same characters ! Everyone speaks the same and they all seem to have interchangeable motivations. Sometimes it seems like there is only one character in the book. Start to think the writer is just dashing off this rubbish. ( )

I've been hooked on Ellroy's books all year long. Once again in his Second LA Quartet series, Peridia doesn't disappoint!

Complex characters, and a complex story line hooked me from the start. If you're a fan of L.A. Noir, this is must-read! ( )

Mystery

James Ellroy’s Perfidia is both fascinating and infuriating. It’s a gift for Ellroy fans, though, because it features characters from his seven previous novels. (The dramatis personae in the appendix is 5 pages long.) But it’s the kind of ambitiously maximalist doorstop that an editor—sufficiently uncowed and ready to stare down Ellroy and his excesses—would’ve wisely suggested to pare down. Not this case. The plot is ridiculously complicated, so much so that Ellroy needs to have a character recite an 8-page recap. (One of the conspiracies, involving plastic surgery (there’s a similar racket in L.A. Confidential) is so absurdly perverse, you wonder if it’s supposed to be an elaborate running joke on the reader.) The prose isn’t as blunt and staccato as the telegraphic shock of White Jazz (which I enjoyed), so it’s a little more readable, but his characters are given to speaking in the same declamatory diction. The scatology and casual racism is torrential and not for the faint of heart. I’ve always recommended Ellroy, if at all, with misgivings; this one I can’t recommend to anyone at all, though I’ll probably be reading the next one after this book, then the next. ( )

For me personally, having read all of the LA Quartet and Ellroy's next trilogy, this was probably a 3, maybe 3 1/2. But, I really can't recommend it — much better to read one of his earlier books.

Anyway, set in LA, a couple of weeks around Pearl Harbor. Fin de siécle abandon, and the beginning of Japanese internment camps. Plenty of opportunity for casual racism, violence, corruption, wanton behavior. Somewhere in there there's a murder plot, but that becomes so, so peripheral to the book, even while it is a major plot-thread. Not that it's just forgotten — Ellroy wants us to still wants us to care about the case, I believe, and that is probably the central failing of the book.

He wants the murder case to be the loose thread that ties everything together, the lead which, in following, illustrates the whole corrupt LA society, the dangling end which when tugged causes everything to unravel; unfortunately, all that importance is too much for this flimsy plot point to withstand. In short, it makes no sense.

This is not entirely unknown in an Ellroy novel — there's often a point where I'm like "wait, was I supposed to have remembered that? Why is that happening now? Ah, well, just go with it". But that is way more pronounced in this book — in fact there is a multi-page confessional, written by one of the implicated parties, explaining for the reader how everything tied together. I can only imagine that passage was pressed upon Ellroy by a desperate editor, and, while that urge is understandable, it really highlights the deficiencies of the book rather than remedies them. Better by far to have just created a better plot.

Other notes: multiple characters from the previous books, which is kinda interesting. As ever, dialogue not his strong suit. As ever Ellroy revels in the milieu of a racist, sexist, corrupt, greedy society — the line between glorifying and exposing is never so blurry as with Ellroy. Over long. ( )