In 1958, Manchester United was flying high. The best-known soccer team in the world and reigning English champions, the team was led by a bright young group of star players nicknamed the “Busby Babes” after their charismatic manager Matt Busby. But on a snowy afternoon that February, a plane carrying the team back from a European Cup match crashed on takeoff in Munich, killing 23 people --- including eight Manchester United players and three team officials. The accident destroyed the team, traumatized fans all over the world, and devastated the tight-knit community in Manchester. In MUNICHS, renowned novelist David Peace reimagines the crash and its aftermath, dramatizing the deep scars it left on British society.

Starting in American-occupied Tokyo, where tension and confusion reign, American detective Harry Sweeney leads the missing-person investigation for General MacArthur's GHQ. Fifteen years later, as Tokyo prepares for the global spotlight as host of the summer Olympics, private investigator Murota Hideki --- who was a policeman during the Occupation --- is confronted by this very same case, and is forced to address something he's been hiding for more than a decade. And 20-plus years after that, as Emperor Shōwa lays dying, Donald Reichenbach, an aging American eking out a living in Japan teaching and translating, discovers that the final reckoning of the greatest mystery of the era is now in his hands.