Five Decembers

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Wildly ambitious and deeply haunting, Five Decembers drops you in the middle of a dark noir dream full of heat, loss and memory. The cover picture suggests it’s a hardboiled crime fiction novel – not a bad thing in itself – but that’s not really the case. In the acknowledgements, Kestrel states that the original manuscript for FIVE DECEMBERS had tipped the scales at nearly seven hundred pages, but through advice from his agent, he cut it down to just over four hundred. Then I read it one more time sitting in my car in the library parking lot, before turning the book back. The detective discovers that the woman--who appears to be Japanese but has no identity as of yet--was killed after the admiral's nephew, as if whoever did it wanted her to see.

In fact, that's maybe the biggest problem of this novel- the author chose to focus on all the wrong details while barely mentioning that things that truly mattered). plot strands come together exquisitely in a truly breathtaking finale that is unbearably violent one moment and tearfully tender the next.

Things get complicated when one of the victims turns out to be a relative of a prominent Navy admiral and the other is a young Japanese woman. It merges elements of hardboiled crimefiction into a tale of survival and a sweeping historical novel that looks at little known issues, such as Japanese pacifism and more.

You want to turn the pages as quickly as possible to find out what happens next, but you also want to take your time and soak in the vivid imagery of Hawaii that the author gives us and also take our time when he describes the vast death, destruction, and impact the war inflicted. This stellar Wartime Noir from James Kestrel packs an emotional punch that left me reeling, it is powerful, profound and moving, whilst defying genre classification.

Though this is the author’s first novel under the Kestrel pseudonym, Hard Case Crimes lists blurbs from his previous books by the likes of Stephen King, Lee Child, and James Patterson. Joe McGrady is a hollowed out police detective who won't be derailed from the trail of a sadistic killer despite having his life totally upended in the wake of momentous historical events, or perhaps because of it. Having completed the book – which comes with an ending that’s pretty unforgettable in and of itself – I was amazed to discover that it was only written in 2021; I’d assumed that it must have been penned perhaps seventy years earlier.

As soon as I started reading it I passed the word to reader friends, one of which, wondered like me, how this author slipped under our radar—how could this be a first novel? The Honolulu, Hong Kong and Tokyo of the era are expertly drawn and the full horror of war and what it does to people is hammered home.Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. McGrady is assigned a partner in Fred Ball, who's never detained a suspect he couldn't beat an answer out of, and following a lead to Guam, assures his lovely girlfriend Molly that he'll be home soon.

This extraordinary novel is so much more than just a gripping crime story—it’s a story of survival against all odds, of love and loss and the human cost of war. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.The author has created a very likeable character in Joe McGrady and when you finish the book, you leave Joe with regret, wondering what his life will be like after. The war has come and gone, millions of lives have been lost, the horror of the camps and the atomic bombs make for a landscape, despite American power and optimism, of existential emptiness.