Five Decembers, a Book Review I had to Write

I don’t read crime novels all that often. The genre, as a genre, doesn’t attract me. There are some good ones and many that are forgettable. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this one: Five Decembers by James Kestrel.

ISBN: 9781789096118

I didn’t know much about this, or the author, which is how it usually happens to me. I pick up a book in some way and decide to read it one night. And then I can’t stop. The thing is mesmerizing. The circumstances are not anything I am familiar with, in a place and time I’ve never been. But they are vivid. I am there. The details are right. The setting is right. The crimes are – were – unthinkable. The story builds and builds and twists like a Hitchcock story, but there’s even more to it. There is a passion bubbling through all this, and it also builds slowly just like a suspense thriller. There is death and killing to make WWII’s mass killings seem like a dream, because I was right here, now, in a place where some people died and some people killed. Some of it had to happen, and some of it didn’t. And the lives that were affected also affected me. At one point I stopped breathing, my heart skipped a beat, and I feared death. I felt what the people in it were feeling. And I had to stop for a couple of minutes. And that’s no hyperbole.

I haven’t read anything like this in a long time. This is good, really good. It is the stuff that keeps me reading late, past midnight. I would have read it straight through but I started too late, and I needed sleep really bad and I had little time to do it. So, when I could, I sat down the next day. I looked at the book and told myself I had something more important to do. I started in on what I had to do, but couldn’t stick with it. I found myself looking at the book again, and told myself I’d read just a little bit, but that was a lie because I couldn’t put it down again, and I knew I couldn’t as soon as I read one more sentence.

So, put it on your to-read list. Read it, or don’t. But you’ll be missing something if you don’t.