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. After reading a plethora of thrillers that hinge on text messaging, it was so refreshing to read one revolving around telegrams.

It’s an interesting perspective on WWII b/c the historical era is present and yet, it’s also such an original “take” on it and not the usual European arena either. When the novel opens, in Honolulu, Joe is a police detective investigating the gruesome double-murder of an American admiral’s nephew and a young Japanese woman.In Hong Kong, McGrady falls into the hands of the invading Japanese Army and is swept along by the tide of 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 covers for “hard case crime” books is what actually draws me to them since the covers are a throwback to the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and I’m a great fan of those time periods. 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.

Not just any murder, but one our protagonist realizes changed the entire course of history while he was marooned, including his life and the lives of those nearest to him: the girlfriend who gave him up for dead, and the daughter of the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose father springs McGrady from a prison camp for his help finding the men who murdered his niece, hiding him in Tokyo until the conclusion of the war. In the last few days, his relationship with his girlfriend Molly has gone from casual fling to something more. There are a couple of neat twists towards the end and the book builds to a suitably tough and exciting climax.B. bei einem Meisterwerk wie "Die schwarze Dahlie" von James Ellroy erlebe ich in den seltensten Fällen. At the end of the war back in Honolulu and flush with back pay McGrady makes sure he is dismissed from the police and heads back to Hong Kong to take up the threads of the investigation and finds his prey with remarkable ease, gun fire results. While war doesn’t often play directly into their works, their trauma bleeds onto the pages, the subtext staining their characters with the regrets and the bruised values of people who were forced to do what was necessary to survive.

For those familiar with WW2 history, you will know that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour is coming and leads to the entry of the U.In the last part of the novel we're getting back on track and chasing the killer again, but as mentioned before, everything at this point was ruhsed and unbelievable. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. The murder case itself is ever present here, but bigger events intrude and the tale starts to take on a more complex character.