Looking For a Good Book

Valerie Corbin is a retired caterer and after a beautiful vacation in Hilo Hawai’i with her wife Kristen, the couple have decided to move to the 50th state permanently. Some of the fun in the move is getting to know their new neighborhood and they’ve become good friends with local restaurant manager, Sachiko, and her partner Isaac.

Knowing of Valerie’s experience in the catering business, Sachiko asks if Valerie can fill in at the bar as one of the employees, Hank, has gone missing. Valerie enjoys the opportunity and gets to hear a lot of gossip about the area and the people in it.

When Hank’s body is found at the base of a waterfall, the police’s attention turns to Sachiko. Valerie can’t believe that her new friend killed her own employee, but she’s determined to learn the truth – diving right in to investigate where the police didn’t think to look.

Not too long ago I read an article about some of the best mysteries to read with a Hawai’i setting. This, along with another book that I reviewed recently, were among that list.

Although I now see that this is the second book in a series, I never got any sense that I was missing anything important to the characters or the story. I suspect that there was more of Valerie and Kristen being visitors and falling in love with the island, but I don’t feel like I need to know any of it.

The initial mystery is set up well. As mystery readers we know that Hank is going to be found dead before anyone in the book knows, so we’re watching for signs of who might have ‘dunnit’ and there are some good suspects. I had a good idea of the guilty party (as I suspect author Leslie Karst craftily led me to) but of course was wrong.

The mystery is nicely done, but it’s the characters and the setting that shine brightest here. Valerie is nicely fleshed out and comes across so real it’s easy to forget that she’s a fictional character. It’s also easy to be more interested in her life in Hawai’i without solving a murder getting in the way.

What I appreciated the most was that Karst found a nice way to include Hawai’ian words and the Pidgeon dialect, helping us to feel as though we were there, without making it difficult to read. In the other Hawai’ian mystery (referenced above), the book was actually difficult to read as it attempted to be very authentic with the language. As a non-Hawai’ian, that had been extremely challenging and slowed my reading speed down and took me out of the story as I tried to comprehend the words. Here, Karst gives us the sense of the language so that we can enjoy the story.

This is a cozy mystery, which is not typically something I enjoy.  But of course there are degrees of ‘coziness’ and this gets just a tiny bit more intense.

Overall, I found this quite an enjoyable mystery read and I’d be interested in reading more in the series.

Looking for a good book? Waters of Destruction by Leslie Karst is a mystery that takes the reader on a delightful adventure in Hawai’i.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Waters of Destruction

author: Leslie Karst

series: Orchid Isle Mystery #2

publisher: Severn House

ISBN: 9781448312184

hardcover, 224 pages