DEATH IN HILO

Conscientious cops juggle a double handful of brutal cases in paradise.

Redman’s meticulous, panoramic crime story introduces several intriguing plot threads even before getting to the main event. Eager Honolulu Star-Advertiser novice reporter Zoë Akona visits inmate Michael Cushing days before his scheduled release from a Washington prison after he’s served a long sentence for the Fortunato murder (from Bones of Hilo, 2021), which Cushing calls “the most famous homicide in Hawai‘i.” He brashly asserts his innocence, unspooling a complicated plot that Zoë is later pressed to investigate by the paper’s senior crime reporter, Bernard Scully. Meanwhile, a corpse without hands or a head found in Honolulu’s Kapi‘olani Park becomes the first case for recent police academy graduate Yvonne Ivanovna under the direction of chief homicide detective Kawika Wong. Many presume this is another victim of the Slasher, a serial killer who’s still at large, but the two detectives assigned to that case, both named Jerry, are dubious. When the director of Hawaiian relations for the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope Project on Mauna Kea goes missing, a trio of detectives undertakes the investigation, which has political implications. The activist group Warriors for Mauna Kea virulently opposes the project. Redman, who writes with quiet authority, places Kawika at the novel’s center, returning to him regularly as the lens through which the different cases are viewed. The novel proceeds in a measured, detail-oriented way, beginning with multiple maps and “A Note on Hawaiian Language.” Almost every chapter introduces a new character until a densely textured world of lawbreakers and law enforcers emerges.

A procedural deep dive, long on facts and forensics, short on flash.