Customer Reviews

The Kahuna Killer (Rue Morgue Vintage Mysteries)

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Writer Janice Cameron and her foster sister Lily Wu have returned to their home of Honolulu, both with different agendas. Janice has just written a best-selling novel set in Hawaii, and she is working to find a Hawaiian location to film a movie of her novel. Her foster sister Lily is returning to visit her very large extended family, but the reader soon discovers that Lily is also on the trip to keep an eye on her friend Janice.

Janice has been invited to stay in the home of family friends Luther and Maude Avery. The Averys own a large estate near Honolulu, which includes a native Hawaiian village which is the location that Janice would like to use for her movie. Janice must keep her movie-making plans a secret, though, until she gets the Hawaiian villagers to agree. However, immediately upon her arrival in Honolulu, Janice is warned by her native friends that her host's home is a dangerous and unhappy place and she shouldn't stay there. On her second day in Hawaii, Janice discovers the body of a beautiful young hula dancer, apparently a drowning victim in a cove on her host's estate. A series of apparent mishaps gets the attention of amateur detective Lily Wu, who comes to the aid of Janice and identifies who was behind the drowning of the hula dancer.

This was an extremely enjoyable book, and it was hard for me to believe that the book was written more than 50 years ago. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of Lily Wu's Chinese family. "The Kahuna Killer" is the second novel in the "Lily Wu quartet", a group of four novels featuring Janice Cameron and Lily Wu. I am very glad to have discovered the Rue Morgue Press, which is publishing a number of "classic" murder mysteries popular during before 1960. This particular edition was a joy to read and well-edited.

Despite the fact that this book has a hideous cover, I enjoyed the story even more than I enjoyed the first Lily Wu novel, "The Chinese Chop." This is a well-constructed (but fairly easily solvable) mystery in which the motive for murder makes sense. Sheridan is not an experienced mystery writer (this is her second) or possibly even a mystery reader, because she doesn't plant clues. The solution makes sense, though, and that's important.

The story takes a while to get rolling, but I didn't mind because it's set in Hawaii and reading about Hawaii is enjoyable. When Janice Cameron, the series hero and the person from whose point of view the story is told, discovers a dead body, her friend Lily Wu enters the scene. Lily brings a much-needed observing mind to the crime scene. Lily says to Janice: "Twenty-five hundred years of Confucianism have given us [Chinese] an ineradicable sense of reality. We do not accept the inexplicable, which means the supernatural. I believe that everything which is happening here is being made to happen, for a reason. And starting with that premise, I intend to find out why."

Besides the fact that it is set in Hawaii and written by a person who loved the islands, and besides the fact that the heroes are two young women, this book has a powerful appeal because the author is respectful of Hawaii and the culture of its people.

I found the second of the "Lily Wu" mysteries more fun than the first, mainly because it takes place in Hawaii and details a lot of information about Hawaiians. It also makes you want to live there. The book is written from the perspective of Janice, who is staying at the home of an old friend of her late father's. Lily is not really the central character, although an important one. The writing is fluid and the mystery is satisfying. Recommended for light mystery lovers.

This is the second Wu-Cameron mystery from the obscure writer Juanita Sheridan.

In many respects this is a fine book. It is well written; the mystery is compelling but not exactly a stumper. The pre-statehood Hawaiian setting is very well depicted and indeed the most memorable part of the book.

But there are a number of problems with the book. The first is pacing. It takes a good 50 pages or so for the mystery proper to get into high gear. This dovetails into the second problem which is that there is too much Cameron and not enough Wu. Lily Wu is far more interesting than Janice Cameron but she spends too much time off stage. The third problem is that one can't escape the feeling that Sheridan really wanted to write a novel about Hawaiian culture but was obligated to graft a mystery onto it. The mystery proper thus takes a back seat to its surroundings.

These problems aren't really deal breakers. I can recommend this to all mystery fans but those that have anthropological interests will get more out of it.