January ´42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese residents are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park. The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They´re wrong. It´s an early-warning signal of Chaos. There´s a murderous fire and a gold heist. There´s Fifth Column treason on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, Commies, and race racketeers. It´s populism ascendant. There´s two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with history. Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He´s a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He´s gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She´s a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to her core. L.A. ´42. Homefront madness. Wartime inferno--This Storm is James Ellroy´s most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes. It is a masterpiece.