Five Decembers

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The lurid cover hearkens back to the days of Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammet, but this tale overtakes the classics by leaps and bounds.

Joe McGrady immediately finds himself fighting for his life and then is whisked across the Pacific to find a small clue in the Far East as the war in the Pacific erupts and there's no way home. Read this book for its palpitating story, its perfect emotional and physical detailing and, most of all, for its unforgettable conjuring of a steamy quicksilver world that will be new to almost every reader. 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. 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. It encompasses an important phase in history within the scope of that man’s quest to solve a murder.It begins with a murder on a small scale and expands into something so much more, while never straying focus far from its central mystery. Regret and loss naturally become a recurring motif, occasionally miring the protagonist in self-doubt and the thought of what could have been. At one point Joe finds himself in Kowloon and he takes the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour to Hong Kong Island and then onward and upward, travelling on the funicular railway to the summit of The Peak. I went into the reading blind, unaware of when it was written or takes place, and was rewarded with one surprise after another. It is one of best novels I have read about the twilight days of empire, its protagonist getting caught up in the maelstrom of the British, Japanese and European empires dragging themselves into oblivion.

One of the best hardboiled mysteries I've read in years, and an epic war story and love story to boot.

Barely a generation later in World War II, Graham Greene was immersed in real international intrigue in Sierra Leone, working under Kim Philby, the man who would later become one of the most notorious Russian moles in history.

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. The story starts in November 1941 in Honolulu, Hawaii with Joe McGrady a detective with the Hawaiian police force starting to investigate a brutal murder. LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public.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. Thanks to the recent Wall Street Journal review by Tom Nolan, I learned this author is writing under a pseudonym, when I find out who he (maybe she) is - I'm going to devour the other works.

When Hong Kong is invaded and Pearl Harbour attacked by the Japanese, he is cut off from all he has: at this stage, we are totally gripped with his destiny as a man isolated in an enemy country, his love story, his investigation and the man who keeps eluding him. Police investigation/crime novel, combined with WWII story, combined with love, loss and grief and redemption is how I would categorize this one. This is one of those books that’s tricky to review because I don’t want to say much more about the plot because it takes some surprising twists that end up being the best part of the of the story. 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. 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.I’m okay too, unless it’s, like love scenes in a romance novel, one indeed fast upon following another. Almost immediately the situation escalates rapidly as it becomes obvious that there's a lot more to the situation than McGrady first thought.