Review by New York Times Review
the LOS angeles of James Ellroy's latest historical thriller, THIS storm (Knopf, $29.95), is the kind of place where rats as big as cats fearlessly scoot across the front porch, where lovers rendezvous in welcoming Tijuana, anonymous among the "child-beggar swarms" and "cat-meat taco vendors," and where sentiments of pure, undiluted venom ("Hate, hate, hate. Kill, kill, kill") express the prevailing state of race relations. We're talking about the Los Angeles of January 1942, when a New Year's Eve broadcast by Father Charles Coughlin laments that his warbattered listeners must stand shoulder to shoulder with the "rape-happy Russian Reds" in resistance to "the more sincerely simpático Nazis." In such a soul-crushing environment, a simple murder comes as a relief. Or so thinks Dudley Smith, a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, currently working for Army intelligence and devising all kinds of war-profiteering hustles on the side. Torrential rainstorms have unearthed a corpse, washed up in its very own pine box on a par-3 golf course - a "long-term decomp," in cop parlance, meaning the remains are sans flesh and all bones. By official guesstimate, man and box were burned in a fire, circa 1933. But the repercussions of the case will play out over the next several months. ("There was no better time to howl and throw parties.") For readers who keep track of these things, "This Storm" is the second volume, after "Perfidia," of Ellroy's Second L.A. Quartet. (For my money, the most notable novels in his great saga are "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential," the first and third books of The L.A. Quartet. But honestly, you can pick up the story anywhere.) Here the characters in those previous novels are younger and dangerously reckless. And this time we take a long look at Hideo Ashida, "crack forensic chemist and sly sleuth," who barely escapes internment by covering up a bookie racket: "Great shame undermines his great luck." Until it runs out, his luck is also ours: Of all the flawed characters caught up in the swirl of this epic novel, he's the guy with the most heart. if YOU'RE going to be bludgeoned to death with a bottle of wine, it might as well be a vintage with a certain cachet. In Anthony Horowitz's new mystery, the sentence IS DEATH (Harper, $27.99), a celebrity divorce lawyer named Richard Pryce is murdered with a 1982 bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, which is not too shabby. Classier still is the metafictional plot construction, which allows Horowitz-the-author to play Horowitz-the-character in his own novel. "I like to be in control of my books," he says, explaining why he has positioned himself as the lead detective's sidekick. The victim wasn't short of enemies. In one unseemly public display, a pretentious feminist author poured a glass of wine over his head and thus positioned herself as a suspect. But as the detective, Daniel Hawthorne, bluntly notes after the author has shared his own theories, "It was all too bloody obvious, mate." NOT HAVING aged in the past 20 years, Aimée Leduc, the heroine of MURDER IN BEL-AIR (Soho Crime, $27.95) and other Parisian mysteries by Cara Black, is quite capable of being the mother of a darling, almost-l-year-old child named Chloé. To be sure, time goes slowly in this captivating series and it's still only 1999. Aimée is still wearing high-fashion vintage clothing and scooting around on her pink Vespa while solving computer security breaches for Leduc Detective - and the odd murder case for her own satisfaction. Here Aimée's in Paris's 12th Arrondissement, not for the opera or for a stroll in the Bois de Vincennes, but to solve the murder of a homeless old woman. Aimée is also in search of her unpredictable American mother, Sydney, who has disappeared after failing to pick up Chloé from her playgroup in Bel-Air. Aimée doesn't need to pack heat on these adventures; the stiletto heels of her Louboutin ankle boots are weapon enough. But something more lethal is called for when Sydney's secretive work as a former C.I.A. operative comes to light, threatening not only Sydney and her professional contacts but also her family, including (gasp!) baby Chloé. DID martin walker really kill off that nice American art history student in the body in the castle WELL (Knopf, $25-95)? Yes, he did, which is very daring, considering that this is one of his charming mysteries set in the beautiful Périgord region of France and featuring his amiable sleuth, Bruno Courréges. Nice young women like Claudia Muller are rarely bumped off in nice country mysteries with nice local detectives, especially not detectives who take their horses and their truffle hounds into the woods for the sheer joy of it. But Walker knows exactly what he's doing in this series, which artfully seasons its plots with regional lore about the sport of falconry and with lessons in French history, particularly the World War II resistance - all while gently teasing the locals for indulging in "the French love of ceremony and dressing up." Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
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.--Keir Graff Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
MWA Grand Master Ellroy's stunning sequel to 2014's 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) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 dramatis 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 Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
