Five Decembers by James Kestrel

Hard Case Crime, 432 pages, $22.99

What an appropriate book to review in December!

At first glance, "Five Decembers" appears as though it is going to be a traditional noir book. Then, surprise! World War II intrudes and it becomes a spy book. A history book? A lesson in integrity and honor? Whatever else it is, at its very heart, it is noir at its best.

Joe McGrady was a soldier and when he mustered out, he became a cop. The draw for me is that Joe is a cop in Honolulu, Hawai’i. His story begins days before the Pearl Harbor attack and the commencement of the United States’ official involvement in World War II. Joe is a regular guy who has a smart girlfriend, a ball-busting cop partner, a hope for a better life. Fate intervenes to do its damndest to see that he doesn’t get to keep any of that.

On a certain day in November 1941, Joe is sent out by his boss to investigate a hanging in a small shack on a dairy farm on the other side of the island of O’ahu. What Joe finds is horrible. A man is hanging in the shack, but also, a woman is found covered by a pile of stuff on a cot. Both have been brutally murdered. The man is Caucasian and the woman is Asian. Does racial intolerance have anything to do with their deaths?

Upon returning to the shack after phoning his boss, Joe encounters a man who looks as though he intends to torch the shack. In a firefight, Joe is forced to kill the man, thus eliminating a chance at getting information the easy way. Joe has had enough experience with crime, and with a little help from well-honed intuition, he guesses that there is another person who also committed the crimes. His new mission in life is to track down who the victims are and who the killer in the shadows is.

Author James Kestrel does a wonderful job of re-creating Honolulu in the 1940s. There are the bawdy streets of Chinatown in downtown Honolulu, there are the drive-in restaurants that serve local fare, there are the old buildings, including the Hawai’i Theater and Alexander and Baldwin building, which marked downtown. It’s all wonderfully nostalgic. It’s also a very white version of O’ahu. There are no pidgin English-speaking locals, no tenements. At one point, Joe drives out to a plantation town of Okinawan immigrants —immigrants were used for manual labor in the pineapple and sugar cane fields — to see if the dead woman was their missing daughter. That’s as close as we get to seeing the other view of Hawai’ian society.

It turns out the man in the shack was the nephew of an Admiral of the Pacific fleet. All of a sudden, Joe has a lot of support and resources to find the remaining killer. That’s good because he certainly doesn’t have much in the way of either from his chain-smoking, prune-faced boss at headquarters.

Because of this, that and the other thing, Grady soon finds himself on a marathon trip across the Pacific to find the killer, whom he believes fled on an earlier flight. His first point of investigation is Wake Island, a small, flat island holding no more than a military staging base. There was another death there, with a similar MO to the one in Hawai’i. And that death leads him ever further westward until Joe is caught in the dual nets of fate and time in the adventure of a lifetime. Joe hopes he will have more of a lifetime to tell his tale.

This book has so much to offer. The details of old Hawai’i might appeal to only me, but the character of Joe, his history, his hurts, his hopes, his tough-guy demeanor should pull any reader to read one more page, and then yet one more. Although credulity must be accommodated at some points, it is a well-balanced story: gunfights and gentleness, brutality and beauty.

For Charlie Chan fans — who must know that Charlie was based in Honolulu — there is a reference by Grady’s prune-faced captain to Apana Chang, the legendary, real-life police detective upon whom Earl Derr Biggers based his fictional character. That reference sold me on this book. Then so did almost everything else.

Congratulations to James Kestrel and Hard Case Crime for a sensational book. MBTB star!