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. As an ex-soldier with no family to speak of, Joe is a loner who didn’t grow up in Hawaii so he’s seen as an outsider even by his fellow cops, and it’s evident from the start that he’s not entirely trusted by them. The story has a nice old-fashioned noir flavor and I welcomed the less graphic love-making scenes I found them more romantic and much more poignant.

I just finished the book(literally minutes ago) and was blown away and had to post this five star review. McGrady is the first on the scene and shortly after discovering a young man cut open, confronts a man trying to destroy the crime scene and shoots it out with him. The events in this story seem unbelievable -- but then, with so many people involved in the war, somebody could have had experiences like this.And at its heart the book a tale of 1941-1945(hence 5 Decembers) and what the world was like then-so different from now—its like going in a time machine to inhabit a lost world. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. At the station, McGrady learns that there was a brutal murder on a dairy farm on the other side of Oahu. I picked this one up because it’s a Hard Case Crime novel and I’ve enjoyed Stephen King’s Hard Case Crime books so I thought I’d give this one a go.

Then I read it one more time sitting in my car in the library parking lot, before turning the book back. It’s a Hard Case Crime novel set in Hawaii just weeks before the infamous Pearl Harbor attack occurs on December 7, 1941.I found some of the twists a bit hard to swallow (particularly the one that covers the long stretch in the middle) but I have to admit Kestrel makes it all worth your while at the end. The immensity of the global conflict allows Kestrel steep escalation with his plot twists that are not present in more conventional murder mysteries. 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.

The covers for “hard case crime” books is what actually draws me to them since the covers are a throwback to the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and I’m a great fan of those time periods. I think, if you can get past the first scene, you’d find this one interesting to think about in so many ways. In private, the admiral recommends that McGrady proceed with “operational discretion,” an option that requires him to operate clandestinely rather than announcing his investigative interests to foreign authorities. Of course, history tells us that by the 7th, the US is attacked by Japan and all hell breaks loose in the Pacific. The wide ranging cast of characters in the story is what grabs the reader, from the likes of Molly, Emily Kam, to the Takahashis and Kate, they had me invested right from the beginning, up to the final pages of that poignant ending.McGrady’s character was easy to route for as were the other people where were important to him (I am being vague on purpose so that you can get to know everyone on your own). 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.

But I was surprised nonetheless when Hard Case Crime’s publisher Charles Ardai invited me to preview an upcoming release-Five Decembers by James Kestrel. In the last part of the novel we're getting back on track and chasing the killer again, but as mentioned before, everything at this point was ruhsed and unbelievable. Joe will travel widely and meet really interesting people: some helpful and others very much the opposite.This simple style is used throughout the narrative, and the monotony is broken only by realistic dialogue. December 1941: America teeters on the brink of war, and in Honolulu, Hawaii, police detective Joe McGrady is assigned to investigate a homicide that will change his life forever. But this contains really only two scenes I can think of with distaste and this is a very looong novel. There are a couple of neat twists towards the end and the book builds to a suitably tough and exciting climax.