This Storm
James Ellroy
(William Heinemann $38)
This Storm is the second volume of the Second L.A Quartet. It's just three weeks after Pearl Harbour and local Japanese are being rounded up and sent to internment camps. As ever Ellroy casts a wide canvas - and the serpentine plot which involves a 1930s gold heist, political intransigence, dead cops and real life members of the European exile community including Otto Kempler, Kurt Weil and Orson Welles is narrated in typical rat-a-tat style - "Dudley scoped the terrain. Eyes left: hills and Jap fishing towns. He'd raid them. He'd roust Fifth column Japs and plain old Japs set for internment. Eyes right: the cliffs, the coves, the sea."
If you're looking for character insight or development look elsewhere.
I have been a fan since the 80s (so seek out 88's The Big Nowhere) but - like novelist Brett Easton Ellis or filmmaker Nicolas Refn - Ellroy's art is polarising and by this late stage you're either in or out. His world is a relentlessly dark, claustrophobic place - full of coon-hounds, dope fiends, perverts, rapists, nazis, glue sniffers, whores, corrupt priests and racist cops. Here Ellroy's megalomaniac enthusiasms for a long-gone L.A (he has taken to referring to himself as "the white knight of the far right") run to almost 600 pages and will try the patience of even the hardiest acolyte. At least local publishers had the good sense to dispense with the US edition's swastika cover in this part of the world.
City of Windows
Robert Pobi
(Mulholland $33)
"If you wanted to scare an urban population, few tools were as effective as a faceless man with a rifle" writes Pobi. Few crime series get out of the gate as effectively as this - a page-turner that isn't scared to get political, one critic describes it as "The Day of the Jackal for Trump's America" (second amendment apologists should stay clear). This ex antique-dealer and keen shark hunter hits the bulls-eye with his fourth novel combining an all too real plot, a compelling protagonist (Lucas Page) and some razor-sharp prose. Page is the kind of guy NASA call when they have a problem; an accident that he refers to as the Event left him with severe physical trauma, one eye and sophisticated prosthetics. He's lured back to the FBI after a serial sniper starts targeting people in a bitterly cold New York. Add in a feisty, no BS female partner, a crazy fellow prosthetic wearing jujitsu master (an Aussie no less) and Page's gaggle of adopted children and you get the start of an intriguing new series.
