Kamikaze

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

Michael Slade is the pen name of Jay and Rebecca Clarke, a
father–daughter writing team in British Columbia. They have written 11
previous thrillers about Special X, a fictitious RCMP unit.

In Kamikaze, a Japanese gangster comes to Vancouver to kill a veteran
American airman who had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 60-odd
years ago. His opposition includes valiant undercover police officers
and various characters who have agendas of their own. The writers have
boned up on modern weaponry and police tactics, which further adds
authenticity to this action-packed novel. It also features a disparate
pair of twins whose origin is such an imaginative twist that no decent
reviewer would give it away to readers.

There is a good action tale in here, sandwiched between World War II
history and some revisionist commentary. Though much of the book focuses
on the vengeful killer’s stalking of his intended victim, equal time
is given to the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.

The authors vividly describe the barbaric cruelty inflicted by the
Japanese military during World War II. One character is based on the
real-life Kamloops Kid, a B.C.-born Japanese prison guard who delighted
in savaging Canadian prisoners of war. Yet, they later find the military
necessity of using the A-bomb to be reprehensible. America’s tactical
decision to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima to end the war is presented
as a “conspiracy” by President Harry S. Truman to deliberately
slaughter Japanese civilians.

Prejudice is always embarrassing to come across, and Kamikaze offers
some dollops of anti-American bigotry throughout. But it is the
authors’ own thriller, and they should be free to express their
personal views amid the derring-do.