Booked & Printed

by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo

 

 

 

In times of turmoil, women labor on behalf of others more often than not. They emotionally soothe. They care for the chaotic and the ill. They pause or end their own ambitions to nurture someone else. All the while, sexism maligns women’s own strength while demanding they expend more and more of it. 

There are moments when a beleaguered woman leader must summon someone else, a source of authority who will encourage them forward. This issue, Booked & Printed finds two protagonists facing the burdens of chilling crimes. In the process of sleuthing, they call on the strength of those who came before them, going so far as to contact the matriarchal powers of another realm. 

 

In Hawai‘i Rage by Tori Eldridge, Ranger Makalani Pahukula is glad to be home, but she cannot abide the quiet of her current posting. She was a law enforcement ranger in Oregon, and she faced a difficult case in in Kauaʻi, her family’s home island. But at Puʻukoholā Heiau National Historic Site on Hawaiʻi Island, Makalani’s male boss makes her sit, read history books, and talk to visitors. When she speeds off on an ATV to save the life of a young boy who fell into a lava tube, her boss is incensed. But that white-knuckle rescue is the nature of the work Ranger Makalani craves, and is denied. 

Elsewhere on Hawaiʻi Island, Larry Hiapo is a paniolo in his mid-sixties, a cowboy and cattle rancher from a Hawaiian family whose connection to the land goes back generations. His sons are supposed to be running the ranch in his semi-retirement, but Larry insists on riding out alone to retrieve a lost bull, a beautiful, docile creature. On horseback, he finds the bull easily, stuck in a pit dug to catch wild cattle in the days of the kingdom. But a manmade sound startles Larry’s horse, throwing Larry into the pit. The bull is no longer docile. It is frenzied. While fighting for his life, Larry glimpses a man he recognizes. 

Larry Hiapo’s gruesome, tragic fate is one of the most memorable death scenes in recent mystery and thriller memory. It follows his consciousness to the very end of his deep paniolo expertise. 

Rosie, Hiapo’s daughter, does not accept, as the rest of the family and the police force do, that Larry’s death was an accident. Ranger Makalani Pahukula is her cousin-in-law. Rosie appeals to the ranger to spend time on the ranch and keep an eye on her son, an eight-year-old paniolo in the making. Makalani volunteers for the tough, fulfilling work, waking at four a.m. to join the Hiapo brothers in their cattle duties on the ranch. With each tense conversation and obsessive drive around the island, Ranger Makalani unfolds a map of grievances and wrongdoing extending back to the Hawaiian Kingdom. 

Hawai‘i Rage is the second installment in Tori Eldridge’s Ranger Makalani Pahukula mystery series. It is a vivid immersion into contemporary Hawai’i, a place too often flattened by outsiders’ assumptions of paradise. The mystery has Kānaka Maoli—indigenous Hawaiians—at its heart, with a deep understanding of distinctions within those in diaspora and those at home. The ʻāina—the nurturing land to which Kānaka have a deep, spiritual, and physical responsibility—anchors the plot and characters’ choices. Sea creatures like turtles and living plants like taro are not merely features of the landscape. They are ancestors, to be called upon with grace, ritual, and humility in times of crisis. At a pivotal moment, Makalani calls on manō —a shark, an ancestor of her matriarchal line. That moment decides Makalani’s potential to continue on to the truth of Hiapo’s case, and the deeper truths rending the people of the ʻāina. 

Hawai‘i Rage is a taut thriller and a deeply felt depiction of all the Kānaka Maoli and the ʻāina have endured. It honors, too, the service women like Ranger Makalani offer in their restoration. 

 

In Hear the Dead by Ann Dávila Cardinal, Elena Altieri is at the end of middle age and living in Vermont. She stays far from her ancestral island, Puerto Rico, and avoids the center of its diaspora, New York City. She teaches community college classes online, and she is losing her hearing. No one witnessing her life now guesses at her past. 

In her teens and twenties, Elena earned the nickname Lens. With her inherited camera, Lens was the expert chronicler of New York’s punk rock scene in the 1980s. Her best friend from high school, Sin Calhoun, was the bassist of an up-and-coming band in the orbit of punk star Eddie Carcinogen. Sin died young of a heroin overdose, an act Lens considered a deep betrayal. Lens grew up caring for her brutal, heroin-using, widower father, a man who never cared for her. It was a predicament Sin always encouraged her to escape. 

Now, in her mid-sixties, Lens’ career suddenly resurrects. Eddie Carcinogen has died of an overdose himself at age seventy, and Lens’ portraits of him launch her into a photo exhibit at the Guggenheim. Lens reluctantly revisits her photographs of the punk moments in which she came of age. And in the back of her tinnitus, Lens begins to hear a woman screaming. No one else hears it. But Lens suspects she is hearing a young woman’s murder, and that her best friend Sin may not have died by accidental overdose after all. 

Hear the Dead juxtaposes the present day of an aging photographer with the memories of her exuberant, dangerous youth. The elder Lens visits her cousin Yvette, a guide in matters of the spirit. She says that Lens has an ancestral gift, the ability to communicate with the dead. Yvette exhorts Lens: Listen to the woman. 

In slowly accepting an ancestral ability she does not fully understand, Lens listens to the disembodied voices visiting her. She uncovers suspicious overdoses of several young women, and she remembers their punk performances. She hears Sin fighting for her life, and remembers Sin’s thrill at finally touring as a bassist. As sleuth, Lens revisits the friends, characters, and hollowed-out venues of her youth, her suspicion photographically sharp. 

Hear the Dead knots the spiritual supernatural and the rich history of New York City’s punk scene into a satisfying mystery. The book pays homage to the courage young women exercised in a male-dominated genre and respects their unrecognized talent. It highlights the powers of an aging woman too often rendered invisible, honoring the artistic and soulful labor she did, and continues to do, in service to her found family and to the truth. 

 

ALL POINTS BULLETIN: Crippen & Landru are coming out with their fifteen collection of Ed Hoch stories: The Case of the Flying Graveyard feature the late and very popular authors Interpol stories. • Mark Thielman’s third novel to feature agents from the National Park Services investigative branch is out now from Severn River. The Firefall takes place in the stunning, and dangerous, Yosemite National Park. • Gary Phillips’s latest is a heist thriller set in Los Angeles, The Haul (Soho Crime, July). • Upcoming this fall is Jasper Fforde’s latest Thursday Next adventure, Dark Reading Matter (Soho Press, October).