Five Decembers

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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. 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. He's intricate when it comes to police procedure in the 1940s while keeping a fast pace, plausibly sending McGrady across the Pacific on a killer's trail. Wherever Joe thought this would lead, he could never have imagined the twists and turns his life would take over the next five Decembers. 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 young male victim turns out to be the nephew of a high-ranking military identity with plenty of political clout – US Navy Admiral Kimmel. 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.This is unforgettable historical fiction, a mesmerising noir that turned out to be one of my books of this year, and which, if there is any justice in the world, should be hugely successful. I can understand why it won the Edgar–so readable (I had to force myself to put it down), and with so much depth. But McGrady traces a man who is the probable killer to Hong Kong, which was a British colony in 1941. But despite the environment, Kestrel finds ways to slow down the action to create brief moments of levity and serenity. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

I’ve used this saying many times before, but FIVE DECEMBERS is truly the definition of a page-turner. 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.His writing has won advance praise from Stephen King, James Patterson, Dennis Lehane, Lee Child, Meg Gardiner, James Fallows, Pico Iyer, and numerous other authors.