Murder Frames The Scene

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

Murder Frames the Scene is Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl's third novel in her Hawaii Mystery series featuring her two sleuths, part-Hawaiian Mina Beckwith and her fiance, part-Samoan Ned Manusia. Mina Beckwith, currently an out-of-work journalist, and Ned Manusia, an accomplished playwright who sometimes serves the British government in behind-the-scenes operations, 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 who is being ruthlessly hunted by the Japanese police. Ned brings Nigel (and Nigel's new wife) to Honolulu and discovers that Mina is embroiled with a group of eccentric artists whose numbers are being depleted in a series of dramatically staged murders. While Mina and her brother-in-law, Todd Forest, Chief of Detectives at the Honolulu Police Department, look into the murders of the artists, the Office of Naval Intelligence recruits Ned and Nigel 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. The plot not only places the characters in the larger context of world events but also informs the reader about some of the history of Pearl Harbor before it became a base of military operations. Like the previous novels,Murder Frames the Scene offers readers a fascinating glimpse into prewar Hawaii, full of local characters, descriptions of familiar places in another era, and a vivid sense of the islands as much more than beaches and palm trees.

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.

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.

THE MUST-READ MULTIMILLION BESTSELLING MYSTERY SERIES • The final book in the A Good Girl's Guide to Murder series that reads like your favorite true crime podcast or show. By the end, you'll never think of good girls the same way again... Pip is about to head to college, but she is still haunted by the way her last investigation ended. She’s used to online death threats in the wake of her viral true-crime podcast, but she can’t help noticing an anonymous person who keeps asking her: Who will look for you when you’re the one who disappears? Soon the threats escalate and Pip realizes that someone is following her in real life. When she starts to find connections between her stalker and a local serial killer caught six years ago, she wonders if maybe the wrong man is behind bars. Police refuse to act, so Pip has only one choice: find the suspect herself—or be the next victim. As the deadly game plays out, Pip discovers that everything in her small town is coming full circle . . .and if she doesn’t find the answers, this time she will be the one who disappears. . . And don't miss Holly Jackson's next thriller, Five Surive!

"This book deals with contemporary relationships between opera and the media. It is concerned with both, the use of media on stage, and opera on screen. Drawing on the concept of hypermediacy from media studies, it situates opera within the larger context of contemporary media practices, and particularly those that play up the multiplicity, awareness and enjoyment of media. The discussion is driven by the underlying question of what politics of representation and perception opera performs within this context. This entails approaching operas as audiovisual events (rather than works or texts) and paying attention to what they do by visual means, along with the operatic music and singing. The book concentrates on events that foreground their use of media and technology, drawing attention to opera's inherently hypermedial aspects. It works with the recognition that such events nevertheless engender powerful effects of immediacy, which are not contingent on illusionism or the seeming transparency of the medium. It analyzes how effects like presence, liveness and immersion are produced, contesting some critical claims attached to them. It also sheds light on how these effects, often perceived as visceral or material in nature, are related to the production of meaning in opera. The discussion pertains to contemporary pieces such as Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway's Rosa and Writing to Vermeer, as well as productions of the canonical repertory such as Wagner's Ring Cycle by Robert Lepage at the Met and La Fura dels Baus in Valencia"--

The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.

This book is the first full-length study to focus on the various film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novels, which have been a popular source for adaptation since Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1952). The collection of essays examines films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Two Faces of January, and Carol, includes interviews with Highsmith adaptors and provides a comprehensive filmography of all existing Highsmith adaptations. Particular attention is paid to queer subtexts, mythological underpinnings, philosophical questioning, contrasting media environments and formal conventions in diverse generic contexts. Produced over the space of seventy years, these adaptations reflect broad cultural and material shifts in film production and critical approaches to film studies. The book is thus not only of interest to Highsmith admirers but to anyone interested in adaptation and transatlantic film history.