I picked up this book when we were in Hawai’i two years ago,
looking for inspiration for my own Hawai’ian mystery. Kneubuhl is a Honolulu playwright and writer
for a television series “Biography Hawai’i”.
It is the first book in a series
of mysteries set in 1930s Hawai’i.
Set in 1935 Honolulu, the story opens as the new year starts
when a museum curator is found murdered.
A priceless painting is stolen from the museum at the same time. (I felt a Daniel Silva-esque novel coming on
but was quickly appeased.) Kneubuhl’s
sleuths are a British-speaking Samoan-born Ned Manusia and Mina Beckwith, a
Honolulu socialite and newspaper reporter of Polynesian descent. Despite the fact, Mina’s twin sister Nyla is
married to a local police detective Todd Forrest, Ned and Mina take on the
mystery themselves, since Ned brought paintings from England for display.
It isn’t long before the painting is recovered. With art theft removed as a motive for the
murder, Ned and Mina have to determine what is.
By now, more people are killed and they stumble upon a possible cover-up
of the U.S. government having a hand in Hawai’i’s last king’s death, over forty
years before. King Kalekaua died in San
Francisco in 1891. The official cause of
death is listed as Bright’s disease, an inflammation of the kidneys, but
Kneubuhl’s story entertains the idea that he was poisoned to pave the way for
the U.S. government to end the monarch and annex the islands.
Not really a stretch of the imagination.
Kneubuhl infuses a lot of history, imagery and the
environment of mid-1930s Hawai’i but they come across as data dumps and tend to
take the reader out of the story. Also,
she describes Mina’s and Nyla’s clothes in every scene but unnecessarily.
Oh, well. It’s still
a good read.
3 🌈🌈🌈 out of 5
