Second L.A. Quartet Books in Order

The Second L.A. Quartet loops back in time to explore Los Angeles before the original L.A. Quartet. Planned as a four‑book cycle, it currently includes Perfidia, This Storm, and The Enchanters, and traces a long arc from the shock of Pearl Harbor to the early 1960s.

Perfidia begins on December 6, 1941, when a Japanese American family is found dead in an apparent group suicide. Hideo Ashida, a brilliant Japanese American chemist working for the LAPD, ambitious Irish sergeant Dudley Smith, and young diarist Kay Lake all latch onto the case. Within days, the attack on Pearl Harbor transforms the investigation, as anti‑Japanese hysteria, internment plans, and war fever give everyone new motives and new cover stories.

This Storm picks up in 1942 with many of the same characters. A gold heist, a burned‑out church, and a mass grave in Griffith Park point toward pro‑fascist networks, Mexican and American radicals, and corrupt powerbrokers. The book moves between Los Angeles and Mexico, showing how wartime alliances and hatreds blur the line between patriotism and criminal enterprise.

The Enchanters jumps ahead to the summer of 1962. Hollywood fixer and ex‑cop Freddy Otash is hired to manage the scandal around Marilyn Monroe’s final days while handling a dangerous kidnapping case. As he chases tapes, secrets, and payoff money, the story pulls together studio bosses, Teamsters, and the Kennedy brothers in a feverish portrait of an America on the brink of change.

Across the Second L.A. Quartet, Ellroy reuses and reimagines characters from his other cycles at earlier stages in their lives. We see how figures like Dudley Smith, Kay Lake, and Freddy Otash are shaped by war, racism, and the temptations of power long before the events of the first L.A. Quartet and Underworld U.S.A.

The series is rich with diaries, police reports, and overlapping plots, and it rewards readers who already know the later books, since you’re constantly catching echoes and origin stories. For newcomers, starting with Perfidia offers a chronological path into Ellroy’s Los Angeles, even though the books were written decades into his career.