James Kestrel Books in Order

For James Kestrel’s WWII noir: Five Decembers.
For San Francisco noir suspense: The Poison Artist → The Dark Room → The Night Market.
For a hardboiled PI case: Blood Relations.
For darker early thrillers: Redheads → Close Reach.

James Kestrel is the pen name of Jonathan Moore, a crime writer and lawyer born in Stanford, California, in 1977. The Kestrel name arrived with Five Decembers, so some readers met him as an overnight success. The longer story is quieter and more useful: he had been writing, working, moving, and watching people for years.

He studied creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy and later at New College of California. While he was at New College, he wrote three novels that he has said will stay out of print. That is a pretty honest apprenticeship, write a lot, learn a lot, and keep going when the pages are not ready.

Before law school, Moore collected jobs with built-in story engines. He lived in Taiwan for three years, taught English, owned a bar, guided whitewater raft trips on the Rio Grande, worked with kids at a Texas wilderness camp, wrote textbooks, and investigated cases for a criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C. Then came law school in New Orleans and a legal career in Honolulu.

That winding route matters.

You can feel it in the books. Moore writes about investigators, scientists, cops, lawyers, sailors, and outsiders who are forced to keep moving after the world turns strange. His settings are specific and physical, not just scenery: foggy San Francisco streets, icy Antarctic water, wartime Honolulu, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The people in them tend to be tired, smart, stubborn, and not always safe.

Then came Five Decembers.

Published under the Kestrel name, Five Decembers follows Honolulu detective Joe McGrady from a brutal 1941 murder case into the wider disaster of World War II. It is part hardboiled investigation, part war novel, and part love story, with the Pacific theater changing the shape of the case. The book won the 2022 Edgar Award for Best Novel and sent many readers back to Moore’s earlier work.

Those earlier books show his range without feeling random. The Poison Artist is a toxicology noir about obsession, pain, and bodies pulled from San Francisco Bay. The Dark Room puts SFPD inspector Gavin Cain inside a blackmail case tied to old photographs and a buried secret. The Night Market pushes the same shadowy city toward near-future conspiracy. Blood Relations introduces Lee Crowe, a hard-edged private investigator caught in the secrets of California wealth.

He has also written leaner horror and survival stories, including Redheads and Close Reach. Across the names Jonathan Moore and James Kestrel, his books circle the same worries: what people hide, what bodies remember, and what a person will do when the official story does not make sense. He is especially good with professionals who know the rules and still find themselves out past the edge of the map.

Moore lives in Volcano, Hawaii, and works as an attorney practicing throughout the Pacific. The day job has not made the fiction tidy. If anything, it seems to have given the books a sharper feel for procedure, pressure, and people making hard choices in bad rooms.