Ancient Hawaiians left flowered lei s and other tributes to the fiery goddess while Western haoles gifted bottles of gin. Inside Halema‘uma‘u, Pele ’s red-hot lava often bubbled and smoked. Often called the stone eating woman, she’d resided inside Halema‘uma‘u, the pit crater within Kīlauea’s caldera on the Big Island’s southeastern edge. Fiercely jealous of Poli‘ahu, her sister deity, the snow goddess of Mauna Kea, and locked in eternal combat with Kamapua‘a, the demigod of rain, Pele’s exploits fueled the oral history of the islands. Over millennia, her temper tantrums had created the Hawaiian Islands, including Kīlauea and the four other volcanoes that make up the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Pele, masquerading as a glassy-haired old woman, wandered the lava trails around the massive smoking volcanic caldera called Kīlauea. Koa is forced to investigate his own homicide, and step by step, his cover-up unravels until another man is falsely accused.Ĭan Koa stand by and let an innocent man pay for his crime? Is the FBI telling all it knows-or does it, too, have a duplicitous agenda?Īt the same time, Koa-a cop who thirty years earlier killed his father’s nemesis and covered up the murder-faces exposure by the dead man’s grandson. Defying his chief of police, Koa pursues the killer, only to become entangled in an FBI espionage investigation of Deimos, a powerful secret military weapon. The search for her identity leads Hilo Hawaii’s Chief Detective Koa Kane to a mysterious defense contractor with a politically connected board of directors. On Hawaii Island, a volcanic earthquake disrupts an abandoned cemetery-unearthing the body of a woman mutilated by her killer to conceal her identity.

Secret military weapons, saboteurs, a volcanic eruption-and a probe of Chief Detective Koa Kane’s criminal past I reviewed Fire and Vengeance last year, and thoroughly enjoyed it so take a look and see what Chief Detective Kane is up to this time around!

Today I’m pleased to bring you an excerpt from the latest Koa Kane mystery.

Death of a Messenger by Robert B. McCaw