Book
This storm : a novel / James Ellroy.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780307957009
- Physical Description: 589 pages ; 24 cm
- Publisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
- Copyright: ©2019.
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| Subject: | Murder > Investigation > Fiction. |
| Genre: | War fiction. Historical fiction. Mystery fiction. |
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- 22 of 22 copies available at Sitka. (Show)
- 21 of 21 copies available at BC Public Libraries. (Show)
- 0 of 0 copies available at Kootenay Library Federation.
- 1 of 1 copy available at Fernie Heritage Library. (Show preferred library)
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| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
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- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2019 May #1
The second volume of Ellroy's second L.A. Quartet picks up where Perfidia (2014) left off, on New Year's Eve 1941, and begins a chaotic 1942 with a plot so convoluted readers will be grateful every time characters restate the facts. Elmer Jackson, Dudley Smith, Joan Conville, Hideo Ashida, and Kay Lake all reappear, along with a dizzying constellation of characters from other Ellroy novels and real life. The key cases are a 1931 gold heist, a 1933 Griffith Park brush fire, and a contemporary killing in which two bent cops are among three victims in a seedy party pad. Do they all connect? And, if so, how? As the characters work angles to seek gold, power, revenge, or even justice, alliances form, twist, and break against a backdrop of war profiteering and fifth-column activity. A deeper theme, utterly timely given the real-world rise of the strongman, is authoritarianism: swastika pins and uniform fetishes signal cabals of Nazis, Communists, and Sinarquistas (Mexican fascists). If, at some point, most of the characters seem to speak like Ellroy, or maybe his grandiloquent Smith, it's somehow appropriate, plunging us ever deeper into a fevered secret history that could have been dreamed by nobody else. Relentlessly compelling.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A 60,000-copy first printing in some ways belies intense media interest in Ellroy; his first novel in five years is a major literary event. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2019 April #1
Ellroy, master of California noir (Perfidia, 2014, etc.), serves up a heaping helping of mayhem in this second volume of his Second L.A. Quartet. If there's a constant in Ellroy's storytelling, apart from snappy prose, it's that there's a fine and often indistinguishable line between good guys and bad guys: His cops are dirty, his villains sometimes blessed with noble virtues. There's not much nobility in this new novel, though, which picks up after Pearl Harbor in the uneasy months when Nazis are floating around on the streets of Tijuana and LA, soldiers and sailors are battling zoot-suiters, Father Coughlin is sputtering anti-Semitic propaganda across the line on Mexican radio, and Japanese-Americans are being rounded up for internment. But even the beleaguered nisei take time to cast out a few slurs at the Chinese for whom they're confused, while the LA constabulary scours the streets. "How come we're not rousting the dagos and the Krauts?" wonders one, even as everyone avoids the elephant in the room, a shipment of gold that's gone missing. It being Ellroy, there are tangled storylines aplenty as well as a large dr amatis personae, many of whom will be familiar to readers of Perfidia. About the best of them is the Japanese-American police investigator Hideo Ashida, who harbors no illusions about his clientele: "Lustful men and corrupt women. It was ghastly business." Lead player Elmer Jackson, a world-weary flatfoot, has his good points, too, but he'd rather be back in vice than on the Alien Squad, where it "was Japs twelve days a week." Mix in Mary Jane-dealing starlets, sleazy informants, synarchist gangsters, "cops in the Silver Shirts and German-American Bund," Orson Welles and Walter Pidgeon in a decidedly non-Hays Code film sequence, and a thousand other threads, and you've got a raucous tale that will likely leave you in need of a shower and a Disney film. A gritty, absorbing novel that proves once again that Ellroy is the rightful heir of Chandler, Cain, and Hammett. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2019 January #1
In January 1942, thunderous rains uncover a dead body in L.A.'s Griffith Park, which brings together crooked Vice cop Elmer Jackson, LAPD fascist Dudley Smith, war profiteer Joan Conville, and Hideo Ashida, a brilliant crime-lab technician now interned. Second novel, after
Copyright 2018 Library Journal.Perfidia , in a new "L.A. Quartet." - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2019 April #4
MWA Grand Master Ellroy's stunning sequel to 2014's
Copyright 2019 Publishers Weekly.Perfidia opens in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve 1941. Anti-Japanese hysteria has reached a fever pitch and shifting alliances of left-wing and right-wing groups struggle to work out the best way to profit off the war. Dudley Smith, a police sergeant, has taken an Army commission south of the border, ostensibly to thwart Fifth Column pro-Nazi subversives and suspected Japanese submarine encroachments in Baja, but in reality to set up a lucrative wartime business smuggling heroin and illegal immigrant labor. Meanwhile, the L.A. police uncover a body in Griffith Park. Brilliant forensics expert Hideo Ashida, assisted by a talented young scientist with secrets of her own, must grapple with his devotion to Smith and his own conscience as he begins to piece together an intricate story involving a decade-old gold heist and a lethal fire in the park. As Smith squares off against Bill Parker, an LAPD captain on the rise, things get complicated and ugly very quickly. Just when it seems that things couldn't get darker, Ellroy peels back a deeper level of corruption. This obsessive, wholly satisfying probing of 20th-century American history deserves a wide readership. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc. (June)
