Five Decembers

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Fortuitously, McGrady is brought to the uncle of the slain woman, a Japanese official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I went into the reading blind, unaware of when it was written or takes place, and was rewarded with one surprise after another. Start with this badly-overdue refresh of the hard-boiled detective story and add in a sensitive reading of locales and a non-Neaderthal attitude towards women.

But this contains really only two scenes I can think of with distaste and this is a very looong novel. McGrady is a great character with more than a touch of Jack Reacher about him, the taciturn outsider ,a lethal fighting machine and a man that every female character is attracted to. With tensions high, Joe’s boss just wants the case solved as quickly and quietly as possible, and McGrady ends up hot on the trail of the killer across the Pacific.Not only are these vignettes effective in providing the appropriate sense of desperation and fear of firebomb raids and death, they also support the very noirish struggle the central characters suffer with questions of futility and fatalism. There are some convenient coincidences that help to drive the plot forward, but overall I was quite impressed with the authentic feel of this first novel which includes espionage related twists, surprise betrayals, hard-boiled action and a sympathetic investigator drawing you along in an epic historical fiction.

It's an amazing story, filled with suspense, heartfelt romance, gut wrenching tragedy and an unrelenting tension throughout. The murder case itself is ever present here, but bigger events intrude and the tale starts to take on a more complex character.Wherever Joe thought this would lead, he could never have imagined the twists and turns his life would take over the next five Decembers. He’s the everyman, the guy you can’t help but sympathize with and root for when things look their most bleak. 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. War, imprisonment, torture, romance…The novel has an almost operatic symmetry, and Kestrel turns a beautiful phrase.

The end of the war allows for him to complete his investigation which takes him again back and forth across the Pacific. For a book that tried to be all these things at once, Five Decembers succeeded in every way, telling a fascinating mystery that has more sides than a prism, telling a war story that shows how destructive the war was personally to people on all sides, and offering a touching but tragic romance. You probably guessed this from the cover and description but this is one of those books where there are not very many female characters and when women do appear they inevitably fall in love with our protagonist. 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. In der Mitte der Geschichte unterbricht der Autor den Kriminalfall, da der Detective untertauchen muss.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. Short staffed due to Thanksgiving, bachelor McGrady is assigned his first homicide, a dead body on the land of a dairy farmer. It all starts (although it doesn't end there) in pre-war Honolulu in the days leading up to that one fateful day when the bombers appeared over the lush Hawaiian skies and awakened a sleeping giant. Given the time and place one can safely assume from the outset that the gory double murder mystery the story opens with will likely undergo some tumultuous twists and turns.

They could gather in bars, or toss footballs around in a park, and trade stories…He needed to work, and get somewhere. The Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service conducted a surprise coordinated military strike on both Hong Kong and across the ocean at Pearl Harbour. The plot itself, while interesting at first, became ridiculous and riddled with too many incredible and way too convenient coincidences, which became apparent as the book had to draw to a close and the author rushed the story so much that nothing felt believable.With the connect made to Admiral Kimmel, McGrady is thinking along the lines that this was a professional hit. Then I read it one more time sitting in my car in the library parking lot, before turning the book back. It’s an interesting perspective on WWII b/c the historical era is present and yet, it’s also such an original “take” on it and not the usual European arena either. Joe McGrady is a Honolulu cop who trails a suspect to Hong Kong, and is trapped when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.