Murder Casts A Shadow

New Year’s Eve, 1934. While Honolulu celebrates with champagne and fireworks, someone is making away with the Bishop Museum’s portrait of King Kalakaua and its curator. A series of brutal murders follows, and an unlikely pair, newspaper reporter Mina Beckwith and visiting playwright Ned Manusia, find themselves investigating a twisted trail of clues in an attempt to recover the painting and uncover the killer. Honolulu in the 1930s is a unique (and volatile) mix of the provincial and the urban, East and West, islander and mainlander. Mina and Ned, both of Polynesian descent, confront the complexities and contradictions of Island life as their investigation takes them into the heart of Honolulu society and close-knit local families, whose intricate histories and relationships will have a direct impact on future lives and events. A lively cast of characters aids Mina and Ned in their search for answers: Cecily Chang, an antiques and explosives expert, steers them through Chinatown’s back alleys; Hinano Kahana, a hula chanter and dancer, brings Ned closer to solving an ancient riddle; Mina’s grandmother, Hannah, helps them unlock a secret from the past. Prewar Honolulu comes to life in this thoroughly entertaining mystery that evokes a colorful bygone era. The Mina Beckwith and Ned Manusia series continues with Murder Leaves Its Mark, available September 2011.

New Year’s Eve, 1934. While Honolulu celebrates with champagne and fireworks, someone is making away with the Bishop Museum’s portrait of King Kalakaua and its curator. A series of brutal murders follows, and an unlikely pair, newspaper reporter Mina Beckwith and visiting playwright Ned Manusia, find themselves investigating a twisted trail of clues in an attempt to recover the painting and uncover the killer. Honolulu in the 1930s is a unique (and volatile) mix of the provincial and the urban, East and West, islander and mainlander. Mina and Ned, both of Polynesian descent, confront the complexities and contradictions of Island life as their investigation takes them into the heart of Honolulu society and close-knit local families, whose intricate histories and relationships will have a direct impact on future lives and events. A lively cast of characters aids Mina and Ned in their search for answers: Cecily Chang, an antiques and explosives expert, steers them through Chinatown’s back alleys; Hinano Kahana, a hula chanter and dancer, brings Ned closer to solving an ancient riddle; Mina’s grandmother, Hannah, helps them unlock a secret from the past. Prewar Honolulu comes to life in this thoroughly entertaining mystery that evokes a colorful bygone era. The Mina Beckwith and Ned Manusia series continues with Murder Leaves Its Mark, available September 2011.

New Year's Eve, 1934. While Honolulu celebrates with champagne and fireworks, someone is making away with the Bishop Museum's portrait of King Kalakaua and its curator. A series of brutal murders follows, and an unlikely pair, newspaper reporter Mina Beckwith and visiting playwright Ned Manusia, find themselves investigating a twisted trail of clues in an attempt to recover the painting and uncover the killer. Honolulu in the 1930s is a unique (and volatile) mix of the provincial and the urban, East and West, islander and mainlander. Mina and Ned, both of Polynesian descent, confront the complexities and contradictions of Island life as their investigation takes them into the heart of Honolulu society and close-knit local families, whose intricate histories and relationships will have a direct impact on future lives and events. A lively cast of characters aids Mina and Ned in their search for answers: Cecily Chang, an antiques and explosives expert, steers them through Chinatown's back alleys; Hinano Kahana, a hula chanter and dancer, brings Ned closer to solving an ancient riddle; Mina's grandmother, Hannah, helps them unlock a secret from the past. Prewar Honolulu comes to life in this thoroughly entertaining mystery that evokes a colorful bygone era.

A church outing to Punxsutawney is the last place you'd expect to run into a mystery. Especially when it leaves someone dead in the water! When Kelly Armello, the sleuthing librarian, discovers deadly connections between her hometown and the haunt of Punxsutawney Phil, the weather-forecasting groundhog the Groundhog Day, nothing can stop her from digging deeper. With the help of Officer Troy Kennedy, and a few other unlikely characters, the Settler Spring sleuths set out to unravel this grizzly groundhog affair! Join Kelly and Troy for a cozy outing you'll love to the very last, "A ha!".

Author and playwright Victoria Kneubuhl returns with another thoroughly entertaining, yet complex, whodunit set in 1930s Hawai`i featuring the lead characters from Murder Casts a Shadow and Murder Leaves Its Mark. The pair of unlikely sleuths—part-Hawaiian Mina Beckwith and her fiancé, part-Samoan Ned Manusia—find themselves unraveling a deadly web of espionage and murder. As the story opens, Ned is in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, where he has been sent to rescue his friend Nigel, a British spy being ruthlessly hunted by the Japanese police. The action moves to Honolulu where Mina is embroiled with a group of eccentric artists whose numbers are being depleted in a series of dramatically staged murders. While Mina looks into the murders of the artists, Ned and Nigel attempt to ferret out a spy sending reports on the activities of the Navy at Pearl Harbor to the Japanese government. The two plot lines become intertwined as Ned and Mina are enmeshed in a dangerous net of international intrigue. Like the previous novels, Murder Frames the Scene offers readers a fascinating glimpse into prewar Hawai`i, full of colorful local characters, descriptions of familiar places in another era, and a vivid sense of the islands as much more than beaches and palm trees. A Latitude 20 book

This icily innovative thriller begins with every parent’s worst nightmare, when Davis Moore’s teenage daughter is brutally raped and murdered by an unknown assailant. It gets worse. For Davis Moore is a fertility doctor, dealing with cutting-edge genetic reproductive techniques. It’s a controversial and dangerous occupation: Moore has already been the object of a fanatic’s assassination attempt. But for a father driven half-mad by grief, his work presents one startling and dangerous opportunity–the chance to look into the face of his daughter’s killer. From the Trade Paperback edition.

When a weekend of horseback rides and beachcombing at the old Haleiwa Hotel turns deadly, Mina Beckwith and Ned Manusia are on the case. The unlikely pair—she a journalist, he a playwright—find themselves once again on the trail of a killer in 1930s Honolulu, where sugar barons cavort at their beachfront mansions while unrest among the working class grows. Their investigation places them in the midst of hot-headed union organizers and the crème de la crème of Honolulu society as well as the riffraff of the city’s backstreets. Familiar characters from Ned and Mina’s previous adventure, Murder Casts a Shadow, return to lend a hand in another thoroughly entertaining whodunnit from author and playwright Victoria Kneubuhl. Praise for the first Mina Beckwith and Ned Manusia mystery: “Agatha-Christie-in-the-tropics. . . . A tightly plotted novel, crackling dialog, and in Mina and Ned, a pair of intelligent and likable sleuths (think Nick and Nora without the alcoholism and veiled disdain). Murder Casts a Shadow shows the promising beginnings of what one hopes will become a new series.” —Honolulu Weekly

This book analyzes Native-authored detective fiction to consider how Native authors use a popular literary genre to make social, cultural, and political critiques by shedding light on settler-colonial crimes, arguing for strengthened tribal sovereignty, and illustrating the resilience of Indigenous peoples.