THE FLOATING CITY

Lyrically delivered but unfortunately tepid murder tale set against the backdrop of 1890s Hawaii.

Ball (Lava, 1997) is never more certain of herself than in her first few pages, as a corpse over which there will be much ado wends through the waterways of Hawaii on a virtual tour of the island that’s a miniature version of the book’s own, sliding past Buddhist nuns and hula lessons, cockfights and tattoo parlors, then at last reaching the shoreline, where it’s discovered by Eva, a red-haired haole fortuneteller whose real name isn’t Eva and whose true identity, also, is supposed to be a mystery to drive us along. Same goes for the dead man: authorities are soon on Eva’s trail with odd questions, both about the corpse and about her habit of selling sugar pills as medicine, but the more important question is whether the dead man was a Royalist—one of a secret group of Hawaiians trying to remain loyal to Queen Lili’uokalani as the Americans overrun their paradise with measles, leprosy, Christianity, and horny sailors who chase the many prostitutes that were inevitable in a land where adultery was never a big thing to begin with. After Eva stumbles across a mysterious rebel living clandestinely in her home and finds love at the unlikeliest of moments, with another haole named McClelland, we do eventually learn both the identity of the dead man and of Eva herself. But more interesting than that story is its historic backdrop of Hawaii’s brief independence and the queen who is imprisoned by the invading militia. That’s a much more compelling tale than Eva’s and her private eye-style troubles, and Ball’s writing, too, especially her gift for simile, seems at odds with her mystery-genre strategy.

A pretty history weighed down by clunky genre artifice.