Wipeout by Chip Hughes

SPOILER ALERT!

I recently reviewed Needled to Death, a knitting mystery by Maggie Sefton, where I mentioned that it may have a limited appeal to only those interested in the craft. Chip Hughes’ novel Wipeout is to surfing what Sefton is to knitting. Sometimes it seems that Hughes is more interested in spewing out facts about surf boards, surfers and the history of the sport rather than building suspense.

Kai Cooke is a private detective/surfer in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is approached by a very pregnant young woman who wants Kai to prove her husband is dead. He wiped out on Christmas Eve, over a month ago, and was never seen again. His widow is due any minute and the insurance company refuses to pay out his two-hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy until they have proof of his death. No body, no money.

At first, Kai’s task seems impossible since everyone on the island remembers Corky McDahl’s deadly wipeout vividly but no one knows anything beyond that. However unlikely, Kai starts finding clues that may lead to the missing man. In one seemingly implausible scene, Kai travels to Maui looking for a red-headed woman named Maya. Somehow with only those two clues to go on, he manages to find her. Is Maui that small and close-knit?

There was plenty more amiss with the novel. Readers like their sleuths to have the same flaws and human characteristics that we all have but Kai Cooke is a jerk. When his girlfriend Leimomi fears she may be pregnant, he avoids her, using the case of the missing surfer as an excuse. He tells himself he’s not ready to be a father. How did this happen, he asks. Really dumb question for a thirty-four year old. Shortly after, he is seduced by the beautiful Maya, fully cognizant of his girlfriend’s predicament and that Maya’s husband may just have been killed a few hours before.

During his conversation with colleagues, clients and girlfriends, Kai speaks proper English, but when speaking with his surfing buddies, he slips into a dialect that may be Hawaiian but reads like Cajun. There was no explanation why the abrupt change in his manner of speaking. I was reminded of Vanilla Ice or Barbara Billingsley’s role as a jive translator in “Airplane”.

When Kai finally tracks down the errant surfer, alive and well and surfing the same beach he disappeared from, there is no explanation how he faced his death in front of witnesses. Hughes also doesn’t give any reason why nobody on the beach recognizes Corky McDahl when they all recognized him immediately in the photographs Kai showed them just days before. And Corky’s a jerk, too.

The ending is wrapped up a little too quickly and convenient. The drug lord is captured and put away (scene not in the book) and Kai’s girlfriend isn’t pregnant. Not only that, but she’s leaving to spend time with her parents. Kai is freed from any parental responsibility or obligations and can resume his life of surfing.

There is also a lack of real suspense since the run-ins with the kingpin’s goons are limited to one and it wasn’t very exciting. The kingpin must be the benevolent and lenient criminal mastermind there is.

Wipeout, although well-written, is much more a cozy mystery than hard-boiled detective story. If you have an interest in surfing, you may enjoy the multiple references to surfers, techniques and waves. If you want an edge-of-your-seat action-packed whodunit, look elsewhere.