Friday, August 07, 2015

Children of Noah

In eight books, police detective Kimo Kanapa’aka has investigated homicides and other crimes that take place in Honolulu’s District 1, which covers the downtown area from Liliha Street to Punahou Street and from Round Top Drive to Ala Moana Beach, including the Aloha Tower. His cases have taken him around the island, from the Windward to the Leeward Coast and up through the center of the island to the North Shore.

Now, Kimo and his detective partner Ray Donne have accepted an assignment to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, where personnel from a variety of Federal and local agencies are loaned to the Bureau to work on complex cases.

Kimo and Ray must negotiate a new bureaucracy and a tricky case, which begins with threatening letters sent to a U.S. Senator and his family. Things heat up as they discover connections to other harassment of mixed-race couples and families, even children. Since his own kids are a mix of many cultures, from Hawaiian to haole to Japanese to Korean, Kimo feels especially motivated to solve this case.

After so many cases in this small section of the island, though, I wanted to give Kimo the chance to explore crimes without a downtown connection, perhaps bigger cases than a homicide detective might encounter. At first, I thought of transferring him to the state police – only to discover that there is no real counterpart to Hawaii Five-O.Then I participated in the FBI Citizen’s Academy, an eight-week course introducing Bureau operations to civilians, and learned about the Joint Terrorism Task Force – JTTF. What a great opportunity for Kimo!

I was sad to leave behind some familiar faces from the HPD, including his boss Lieutenant Sampson, and one of my favorite supporting characters, Juanita Lum, the secretary in the Vice department. But I couldn’t let Kimo go into this new territory alone—his detective partner, Ray Donne, accompanies him. 

Ray was a big part of Kimo’s decision to accept the new assignment. Ray and his wife Julie have a baby son, and Ray’s hoping to ride a desk in the Bureau’s office in Kapolei, staying out of harm’s way. With the birth of twins fathered by Kimo and his partner, fire investigator Mike Riccardi, Kimo feels the same way.  He needs to be around to pass on the lessons he’s learned from his own father to these two new keikis, fraternal twins Addie and Owen.

Children of Noah has a complicated history. I actually wrote a different book, Ghost Ship, which begins with a motor-sailboat washing ashore on the Leeward Coast, with four dead bodies on board as well as radioactive material. It was a big, complicated plot, and in the end I decided it was really two books. So I split it in half, added a lot of stuff, and came up with this book. Now I have the first half of Ghost Ship that needs rewriting, and a whole new second half with new, stronger villains.
It’s a big task, but I have faith that Kimo will lead me down the right path.

Children of Noah is available as an ebook from MLR right now; other vendors and the print edition coming soon. 

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