Age: 25
male
Joshua Taylor Bassett (born December 22, 2000) is an American actor and singer. He began his career as a teen actor, appearing on the third season of Disney Channel family sitcom Stuck in the Middle (2018) as Aidan Peters. Bassett rose to prominence for his leading role as high school student Ricky Bowen in the Disney+ streaming series High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (2019–2023), and for its accompanying soundtracks, for which he was nominated for two Children's and Family Emmy Awards, winning in 2023. He also starred in Better Nate Than Ever and led the voice cast in Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again (both 2022). In music, Bassett was signed to Warner Records in 2020 and subsequently released four extended plays. His debut album The Golden Years was released on July 26, 2024. He is currently starring as Seymour Krelborn in Little Shop of Horrors on Broadway.
It is December 6, 1941. America stands at the brink of World War II. Last hopes for peace are shattered when Japanese squadrons bomb Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles has been a haven for loyal Japanese-Americans - but now, war fever and race hate grip the city and the Japanese internment begins. The hellish murder of a Japanese family summons three men and one woman. William H. Parker is a captain on the Los Angeles Police Department. He's superbly gifted, corrosively ambitious, liquored-up, and consumed by dubious ideology. He is bitterly at odds with Sergeant Dudley Smith - Irish émigré, ex-IRA killer, fledgling war profiteer. Hideo Ashida is a police chemist and the only Japanese on the L.A. cop payroll. Kay Lake is a twenty-one-year-old dilettante looking for adventure. The investigation throws them together and rips them apart. The crime becomes a political storm center that brilliantly illuminates these four driven souls - comrades, rivals, lovers, history's pawns. Perfidia is a novel of astonishments. It is World War II as you have never seen it, and Los Angeles as James Ellroy has never written it before. Here, he gives us the party at the edge of the abyss and the precipice of America's ascendance. Perfidia is that moment, spellbindingly captured. It beckons us to solve a great crime that, in its turn, explicates the crime of war itself. It is a great American novel.
