December 6 » (Bargain)

Best known for the Moscow detective novel Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith is also known for delivering stories of crime, conspiracy and intrigue featuring protagonists whose loyalties are sometimes murky. Whether he is dramatizing history or fashioning his own facts, Smith fills his deeply researched novels with a sense of darkness underneath the detail.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Gorky Park and Havana Bay comes another gripping novel of loyalty, betrayal, and intrigue on the eve of the greatest military conflict in the history of mankind....

Amid the imperialist fervor of late 1941 Tokyo, Harry Niles is a man with a mission — self-preservation. But Niles was raised by missionary parents and educated in the shadows of Tokyo's underworld — making his loyalties as dubious as his business dealings.

Now, on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Niles must decide where his true allegiances lie, as he tries to juggle his Japanese mistress and an adulterous affair with the wife of a British diplomat; avoid a modern-day samurai who is honor-bound to kill him; and survive the machinations of the Japanese high command, whose plans for conquest may just dictate his survival.

Set in a maelstrom of personal temptations and mortal enemies, with a remarkable anti-hero caught in a land he can never call his own, DECEMBER 6 is a triumph of imagination, history, and riveting storytelling.

The New Yorker

Smith's new thriller is set in Tokyo in the last days of 1941, just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor; its central character, the American Harry Niles, grew up in Japan, where his missionary parents were preaching the Word. Harry isn't very holy, however: he owns a night club called the Happy Paris, dabbles in assorted short cons, and spends much of his time with various mistresses, including the possibly murderous Michiko, the jukebox girl at the Happy Paris. As the rumors of war heat up, Harry finds that he is the victim of his own equivocal identity: Americans worry that he has become too Japanese, and the Japanese suspect him of being a spy. Smith's plot is more than slightly reminiscent of "Casablanca," and the spectre of the Second World War seems, at this distance, almost quaint, but the characters are so well drawn and the local color so colorful that these quibbles hardly interfere with the novel's pleasures.