Five top novels with deeply troubled protagonists

Christopher Swann is a novelist and high school English teacher. A graduate of Woodberry Forest School in Virginia, he earned his Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State University. He has been a Townsend Prize finalist, longlisted for the Southern Book Prize, and twice been a finalist for a Georgia Author of the Year award. He lives with his wife and two sons in Atlanta, where he is the English department chair at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School.

Swann's new novel is Never Go Home.

At CrimeReads he tagged five favorite novels with deeply troubled protagonists, including:

Five Decembers by James Kestrel (2021)

It is November, 1941, and Honolulu detective Joe McGrady is about to have a drink after work when he is interrupted by a phone call from his captain, who assigns the rookie detective a brutal homicide. So begins James Kestrel’s novel, firmly grounded in the style and tropes of noir. One of the murder victims, butchered and strung up by his ankles, turns out to be the nephew of a Navy admiral, who exerts political pressure on the Honolulu PD to apprehend the murderer. But the lone suspect, using a fake passport, has fled Hawaii by plane for Hong Kong. Undeterred, McGrady boards a plane on December 1, 1941, not knowing that a Japanese fleet is already steaming toward Pearl Harbor.

McGrady is an Army veteran, good at his job, with a relationship that is becoming serious. He is a man with a future. But that future is shattered when war breaks out, stranding McGrady in Hong Kong at the mercy of the invading Japanese Army. The story pivots from noir thriller to war epic, but while the scope of the novel and its conflicts shift, Kestrel’s narrative style thankfully does not. McGrady must contend with regret, loss, anguish, and the savagery of war, but in the midst of these he also experiences moments of compassion, dignity, and, most surprising of all, love. Five Decembers hits all the satisfying marks of a murder mystery and then transforms into something else without compromising a single shadow of its noir origins, and Joe McGrady is a character whose story I’ll be thinking about for a long time.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Five Decembers.

--Marshal Zeringue