In Hawaii — a small town spread over an eight-island archipelago — gossip travels easily, giving those with secrets even greater reason to safeguard them. In his new novel, “For a Song,” Rodney Morales, author of “When the Shark Bites” and “The Speed of Darkness,” digs beneath the sunny, opulent veneer tourism companies promote to unearth crime, corruption and death.
The protagonist, Kawika Apana, a private investigator and former reporter, is tasked with locating a missing woman named Kay, who is the daughter, he discovers, of a criminal murdered in an unsolved Chinatown case he covered years ago.
Kawika is divorced and still somewhat bitter about it.
He uses his boat as a crash pad and is out of shape and probably past the prime of his career; he’s flawed and he knows it.
Sometimes his self-pity gets in the way of our liking him, but as the story develops, his griping becomes a comic mantra that further humanizes him.
And although he’s not convinced his life will get better, he finds himself wanting to “help balance the ledger of things gone wrong with things gone right.”
Kawika searches for Kay across Hawaii, delving into local communities from the North Shore to Pearl City to Lanikai, but he quickly finds the case has a much broader scope, from prize fights in Las Vegas to shady hotel dealings in Southeast Asia between businessmen and politicians.
Before long, Kawika realizes there is much more to this case than what’s on the surface.
He teams up with Mia, a triathlon enthusiast who claims to know the missing woman. Mia breathes life into Kawika’s dreary existence, dragging him along on training runs, the two swapping info on the case. He enjoys this interlude but cannot shake the suspicion that Mia isn’t sharing everything she knows with him.
By following the threads, Kawika discovers a darker side to Hawaii populated by corrupt policemen, hired hit men and, towering above them all, a powerful politician pulling the strings. This state senator aspires to higher office and will remove any obstacles to this end, including, if necessary, Kawika.
Morales overlays a far-reaching plot upon a small geographical area.
Hawaii locals will nod knowingly at his portrayal of day-to-day island life shadowed by violence and intrigue. The places and characters will seem familiar, even if the situations and occurrences do not.
Hawaii is such a small place that local readers probably won’t be able to resist drawing parallels, imagined or not, to real-life people and events. And that’s the fun of “For a Song,” knowing that even if all of this didn’t actually happen, it could have, and maybe some of it did.
While the story, like its hero, suffers at times from a slow pace, the mystery and a growing concern for the characters will keep readers turning the pages.
‘FOR A SONG’
Rodney Morales (University of Hawaii Press; $19.99)
