Five Decembers

Five Decembers opens in November 1941, when Honolulu police detective Joe McGrady is called to investigate a gruesome double murder. The trail leads him to Hong Kong just as Japan launches its coordinated attacks across the Pacific, including on Pearl Harbor. Cut off from home and caught in the invasion, McGrady is captured and spends the following years as a prisoner of war, first in Hong Kong and later in mainland Japan.

James Kestrel uses the murder investigation as a frame for a much larger story: survival under brutal captivity, the compression and distortion of years lost to war, and an unlikely bond formed with a fellow prisoner. The novel moves from Honolulu's wartime streets to POW camps to the ruins of postwar Japan, following McGrady across nearly five years before he's finally able to return home and confront both his case and the life that continued without him.

Blending hardboiled procedural with historical war fiction, Five Decembers won the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Novel. It is a slow-building, atmospheric story more concerned with endurance and loss than with a rapid-fire mystery plot.