Epic reprise of Ellroy's favourite time and setting, a return to 1940s Los Angeles and Dudley Smith and Will Parker and Kay Lake and introducing Hideo Ashida, native-born of Japanese descent, brilliant police chemist whose life is made beyond uncomfortable when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour and anti-Japanese sentiment ignites across the country, and in LA, there's talk of round-ups and internment. On the day before the attack, a Japanese family of four is horribly murdered in a gory, ritualistic fashion. The investigation, in the midst of war-time hysteria, racial hatred, crazed eugenics, fascist politics, police corruption and brutality, opportunistic players from every level of society moving in to exploit the coming confusion and officially mandated injustice, proves nightmarish for all involved. Someone will have to take the fall, but will the guilty get away with it?

Written mostly in the terse, hard-boiled tough-cop drawl that Ellroy has perfected, this falls somewhere between LA Confidential and American Tabloid in terms of style, and aspires to be a return to LA Confidential in terms of being a sprawling but tightly-plotted murder mystery. Of course, the most amazing thing about LA Confidential when you first read it, is that there was nothing else like LA Confidential, not even in the LA Quartet. So there's that. Familiarity doesn't exactly breed contempt, but when one of the attractions of Ellroy is his originality, it tends to be missed. On the other hand, Ellroy's been clawing his way back from over-extending his style and his theme in Cold Six Thousand. So: compulsively readable, paced like an express train, twisty and turny and packed with profanity and racism and horrible violence and more depravity than you could believe even a near 800 page crime saga could contain.