Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley (Macmillan Children’s Publishing – Henry Holt and Company BFYR) Aggie Morton Mystery Queen: The Dead Man in the Garden by Marthe Jocelyn (Penguin Random House Canada – Tundra Books)

A Honolulu cop’s search for an unusually brutal killer is upended by the arrival of World War II, which puts his investigation on hold and adds an epic dimension to his quest. stars. Set just before until just after WWII, this is a book that wants to read like a book of the time and mostly succeeds. It has that kind of noir style, though it's much more gruesome than any midcentury book would dare to be and much more willing to talk straight at things than around them, especially when it comes to things like prostitution or drugs, the kinds of things that are usually only obliquely referenced or hinted at. McGrady is arrested on trumped up charges in Hong Kong and shipped off to Tokyo, Japan. Fortuitously, McGrady is brought to the uncle of the slain woman, a Japanese official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The uncle and daughter, Kansei and Sachi Takahashi, provide a safe haven for McGrady for the duration of the war. With the end of WWII though, McGrady is determined to find the butcher who killed Kensei’s niece and the Admiral’s nephew. The trappings of a professional hit make more sense when the victim is identified as the nephew of the commander of the Pacific fleet stationed in Hawaii. McGrady is forced to partner up with fellow detective Fred Ball, who makes a habit of violence in extracting confessions. Ball’s brutality aside, the two men make a good team and soon discover that the killer has flown away from the island and across the Pacific to Hong Kong. With the combined weight of the police and the Navy behind him—and with the benefit of his experience having been stationed in China with the Army—McGrady is sent on his own to apprehend the suspect. Over the course of these years, Joe has to come to terms with who he is and what he is capable of. What is a man when he is floating without a life preserver bereft of all that grounds him in this world?

Five Decembers

War, imprisonment, torture, romance, foreign language and culture are all explored with genuine feeling. The novel has an almost operatic symmetry, and Kestrel turns a beautiful phrase, too...[He] does this very, very well." The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science by John Tresch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Edgar Award for Best Novel 2022. 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. The young man proves to be the nephew of a U.S. Navy Admiral. HPD detective Joe McGrady, a U.S. Army veteran, is assigned to the case. His primary suspect absconds to Wake Island and then Hong Kong under an alias identity. Is ‘John Smith’ a foreign national? It is decided that McGrady should fly to Hong Kong to find the man. And then the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor occurs on December 7th. WWII intervenes!

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. And yet I was not expecting anything nearly so ambitious as what develops.

A Message from SFBook

Five Decembers" is one book that's even better than advertised. In an absolutely breathtaking exciting thriller scheduled for an October 2021 release, James Kestrel (a pseudonym for a current author) offers us in one fell swoop a Hardboiled mystery, a historical war story, a star-crossed romance, and just an endless adventure that you never want to end. 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. Dr. Hannibal Lecter first appears in Thomas Harris’ deeply disturbing Red Dragon (1981), but everyone’s favorite cannibalistic psychiatrist has a more prominent role in The Silence of the Lambs, sharing center stage with FBI trainee Clarice Starling. The FBI wants Clarice to interview the imprisoned Lecter and get his insight into another serial killer, Buffalo Bill, who abducts, kills, and skins his female victims. In the process of these interviews, Clarice forms a strange bond with Lecter, who parses out information about Bill only if Clarice shares details about her own troubled childhood. These may well be the most morally-transgressive therapy sessions in popular fiction. What I can say is that this is a novel built on making readers feel like they’re in a particular time and place, and James Kestrel does a superior job of that. From describing the streets and people of Honolulu in 1941 to several other locations, you get all of the atmosphere without it feeling like a bunch of regurgitated facts from a history class. I read Five Decembers due to its nomination for Best Novel in the 2022 Edgar Awards by the Mystery Writers of America. The winners of the 76th Annual Edgar® Awards will be announced on April 28, 2022. There are only two things I didn’t like, but they greatly interfered with my enjoyment of the story.

The story also plays off the readers knowing that World War II is about to start to good effect. Kestrel drops a few well-placed ominous hints that foreshadow that the whole world is about to go sideways even as Joe is hoping to get the case wrapped up in time to spend a romantic Christmas with Molly. It makes the whole thing one of those books where you’re tensed up the entire time, and just wish that you could warn everyone in it what’s coming. What a wonderful book Five Decembers is! One of the best hardboiled mysteries I've read in years, and an epic war story and love story to boot.” The author's note at the end suggests that there were at least 60,000 words cut out from the final draft. I wonder whether they were important to the plot, or that maybe they should've cut even more out of the final draft... Kestrel’s expertly clipped descriptive passages and dialogue bring his spacious canvas into razor-sharp focus." –

A gripping, taut, magnificent saga unlike anything we’ve ever read in our life. No understatement there. It is a work of power, brilliant plotting, heart and grace" Five Decembers feels like it could have been written during the golden age of noir… hugely satisfying.”– SFBook Review

This is hardboiled fiction at its best: an exceptional tale, filled with emotion, plenty of surprises, and enough violence to satisfy the most bloodthirsty reader.”– Library Journal, Starred Review This is an enchanted place,” a death row inmate tells us. That conceit is central to this book, which pulls no punches in describing its grim setting; any sense of morality seems as archaic as the crumbling prison. And yet there is hope, whether it is in a fallen priest, a death penalty case investigator referred to only as “the lady,” an inmate’s fantastical imaginings of golden horses running deep beneath the prison, or simply a glance at a slice of sky through a window. For all the brutality and violence, there is magic here, much of it in the way Denfeld is able to humanize the darkest and vilest of men. No one is whole in The Enchanted, but through Denfeld’s harrowingly beautiful prose, we are reminded that no one is inherently evil, and no one deserves to live in pain. April 29, 2022 Update Winner of the Best Novel Award at yesterday's 2022 Edgar Awards by the Mystery Writers of America. This was a rare case where my own favourite was the winner 😊! This is certainly an unpredictable book, even when it comes full circle at the end it feels drastically different than the beginning where you feel like you know where you are. 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. Author has previously won praise from Stephen King, James Patterson, Lee Child, Meg Gardiner, Justin Cronin, and many more

Become a Member

Everything about this book is terrific… If I were to recommend just one 2021 title for you to read, it would be this one. It’s that good.”– Deadly Pleasures War, imprisonment, torture, romance…The novel has an almost operatic symmetry, and Kestrel turns a beautiful phrase.”– The New York Times, Best Mystery Novels of 2021 I was completely blown away by Five Decembers. 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. ” This extraordinary novel is so much more than just a gripping crime story–it’s a story of survival against all odds, of love and loss and the human cost of war. Spanning the entirety of World War II, FIVE DECEMBERS is a beautiful, masterful, powerful novel that will live in your memory forever. Unravels much like a traditional mystery, albeit a superior one…. as much a love story as a mystery, if not more…an undoubted success.”-CrimeFictionLover