Five Decembers

Five Decembers opens in Honolulu in December 1941, days before Pearl Harbor. Police detective Joe McGrady is handed a gruesome double murder — a young American man and a Japanese woman — and the evidence he turns up sends him across the Pacific to Hong Kong in pursuit of a suspect. The morning after he arrives, Japan attacks, and the war closes the ocean behind him.

What follows is less a chase than a study of endurance. Cut off from home and from the woman he loves, McGrady is held in Hong Kong and then spends years in Japan under circumstances he never chose, waiting out a war that has erased the life he left. The unsolved case waits with him. When he finally makes it back to Honolulu, both the murder and the years he lost demand an accounting.

Written by Jonathan Moore under the name James Kestrel and published by Hard Case Crime, Five Decembers won the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Novel. It reads as a hardboiled procedural stretched across the whole of the Second World War, more concerned with love, survival, and the human cost of the war than with a rapid-fire mystery.