Five Decembers

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Also, it's been officially revealed that James Kestrel is a pen name for Jonathan Moore, an author I've been reading for several years now. Though Kestrel’s novel takes a detour from the classic noir tropes, he is faithful to the narrative style, seeding the story with so many Philip Marlowe– and Sam Spade–worthy observations that Humphrey Bogart was the narrator in my head: “A dog started to bark in the house next door. Thick ear, shoot first ask questions, if any, later plot but nicely written with engaging characters. They could gather in bars, or toss footballs around in a park, and trade stories…He needed to work, and get somewhere.

Kestrel (a nom de guerre for Jonathan Moore) has written an excellent historical police procedural that opens with the horrific deaths of a young man and a young Asian woman in Honolulu in November of 1941. I don't remember another book I've read in years that had the powerful emotional impact this one has. 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. This edition of Five Decembers is part of the Hard Case Crime (2004-) series of reprints, new commissions and posthumous publications of the pulp and noir crime genre founded by authors Charles Ardai and Max Phillips.HPD Detective Joe McGrady is sent to investigate a murder on the outskirts of town and upon arrival, he’s treated to a gruesome crime scene. The book is so many things—a love story, a gruesome murder investigation, a war story, a hard boiled adventure and survival story—-and it does all those things so well-the writing is so compelling and literate without being obtuse-its fun to read and moving at the same time. Five Decembers is a gripping thriller, a staggering portrait of war, and a heartbreaking love story, as unforgettable as All the Light We Cannot See . In der Mitte der Geschichte unterbricht der Autor den Kriminalfall, da der Detective untertauchen muss.

It goes places I could never have guessed it would; it makes you fear for the main character's fate, and grieve with him, and hope with him, in ways that are rare indeed. Spanning the entirety of World War II, Five Decembers is a beautiful, masterful, powerful novel that will live in your memory forever. James Kestrel evokes the Hawaii, the Hong Kong and the Tokyo of the 1940s with an urgency, a vividness—a passion—few of us can have met before.He is a 2021/2022 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critic Fellow, and his work has been featured or is forthcoming in Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Coachella Review, Thought Catalog, Sein und Werden, and PseudoPod. Trapped in their home for years, Joe learns Japanese from Sachi, and becomes intimately aware of the cost of war from a Japanese perspective, including the unprecedented horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's an amazing story, filled with suspense, heartfelt romance, gut wrenching tragedy and an unrelenting tension throughout. 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. I found it a literally breathtaking book, and I hope other readers will give it a chance when it comes out in October.

At the station, McGrady learns that there was a brutal murder on a dairy farm on the other side of Oahu.This is a big-picture historical novel covering the period from just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the occupation of a defeated Japan.

The murder case itself is ever present here, but bigger events intrude and the tale starts to take on a more complex character.It starts in Honolulu where Joe McGrady, a cop, is charged with investigating a murder, the trail takes him to Hong Kong just as WWII breaks out facilitated by the powers that be which is a bit “would that really happen”, what happens next is even more so but ignore and enjoy.