Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Categories
Thriller / suspense fiction

FIVE DECEMBERS

James Kestrel

A gripping thriller, an unforgettable portrait of war, and a heartbreaking love story, on par with All The Light We Cannot See.

December 1941. America teeters on the brink of war, and in Honolulu, Hawaii, police detective Joe McGrady is assigned to investigate a grisly homicide that will change his life forever. Because the trail of murder he uncovers will lead him across the Pacific, and though the U.S. doesn't know it yet, a Japanese fleet is already heading toward Pearl Harbor. This extraordinary novel is so much more than just a gripping detective storyit's a story of survival against all odds, of brutality and ruthlessness, of love and loss, all unfolding against the backdrop of the most cataclysmic conflict of the 20th century. Spanning the entirety of World War II, FIVE DECEMBERS is a beautiful, masterful, shocking novel that will live in your memory forever.

Acclaim for James Kestrel's earlier work:

Suspense that never stops. If you like Michael Connelly's novels, you will gobble up [Kestrel's]. - James Patterson

An electrifying read, building from shock to shock. I read the last 100 pages in a single sitting. The last chapter is an absolute stunner I look forward to the next one. - Stephen King

Patient, stylish and incredibly suspenseful. - Lee Child

Dark, compelling, and frighteningly plausible. Every twist grabs you hard and pulls you deeper into the mystery. I absolutely could not put this novel down. - Meg Gardiner

A magnificent, thoroughly unnerving psychological thriller written in a lush, intoxication style. I dare you to look away - Justin Cronin
About the Author

A finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker Awards as well as the Hammett Prize, James Kestrel has worked as an investigator for a criminal defense attorney and is currently an attorney himself, living in Hawaii. His work has won wide critical acclaim.

Available products
Book Published by Hard Case Crime

Comments

"Some of my favorite crime novels juxtapose individual murders against the backdrop of wartime mass carnage. This is tough to pull off; it takes a skilled writer to keep the horror of such crimes vivid and stark when they're surrounded by so much other death. In FIVE DECEMBERS James Kestrel, a pseudonym for the horror and suspense novelist Jonathan Moore, does this very, very well. He begins his epic in late November 1941, when the Honolulu police detective Joe McGrady stumbles on a vivisected body. The dead man hung from the rafters, his ankles impaled on either side of an iron spreader bar. There was no question but that he was dead. He'd been split nearly in half, and most of his guts were on the dirt floor. The investigation soon grows fractious and increasingly political and that's before a bomb drops on Pearl Harbor, permanently altering the course of McGrady's life. War, imprisonment, torture, romance, foreign language and culture are all explored with genuine feeling. The novel has an almost operatic symmetry, and Kestrel turns a beautiful phrase, too. A standout line describes McGrady this way: His contradictions were holding him together and tearing him to pieces.

Calmann Levy

Bompiani