When a beautiful woman appears at his office door in December 1941, Detective Tom Hale doesn’t believe her story much.  But when the woman is murdered within hours of meeting Hale, he plunges into a rat race of murder, espionage, and international warfare on a level this hard-boiled detective never thought he’d see.

Hale finds himself hassled by the San Francisco Police, Naval Intelligence, and the FBI.  Most troubling of all, there is someone in the shadows driving the case’s twists and turns. The mystery man always seems to be one step ahead of the others, leaving corpses in his wake.

Thus begins a deadly case, just days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hale discovers the connection to it all — one that ties the deaths and disappearances to the suspicious demise of Hector Bywater, a British journalist and spy during the first World War and one of the world’s most expert naval war strategists. Unfortunately, Bywater died with the terrible secret he learned about Japan’s ultimate weapon, code-named “Dragon’s Gate.”

As this complex brew comes to a head, Hale races to expose the mastermind killer’s identity, but time is rapidly running out for Tom Hale as he becomes the final target.