James Kestrel · 2021Five Decembers
Five Decembers will put you in a vice grip, roll you into a ball of paper, and discard you into the trash can while yelling "Kobe."
James Kestrel's Five Decembers felt like exposure therapy for my OCD. It had me digging into my couch's cat-scratched cushions as Detective Joe McGrady lost four years of his life to a war he never saw coming, one that lifted him right out of his comfort zone like a stuffy in a claw machine. There was nothing he could do to stop it. Basically my worst nightmare.
The novel takes the crime noir genre and flips it on its head, doubling as a history lesson, with Pearl Harbor becoming more than just a catalyst for America's involvement in World War II. You'll frantically whip each page to the side as you can almost feel the earth shake from bombs dropping out of planes in the distant orange Japanese sky.
History doesn't ask for permission before changing your life. Yet by the end of the book, you realize that control can be reclaimed.
Typically, crime noir offers shallow, frivolous narratives with protagonists who think they're James Bond. Instead, I'm left every week with a scene or a piece of dialogue that crawls its way into my ear and sinks its teeth into my brain.
So much so that the re-read might be coming a lot sooner than I had initially planned…