Officer Jenny Freitas of the Hawaii County Police survives an encounter with a hidden lava tube in Langston Otsaka’s backyard, but she finds that Langston wasn’t so lucky. The evidence says he had help falling through the thin crust of rock covering the tube, and now Jenny and her mentor Detective Errol Coutinho have a murder case. The obvious suspects are Langston’s ex-wife Cindy and his estranged son Caleb, who have both come back to Hilo after spending years in the Hawaiian diaspora in Las Vegas. Their motive is money that Langston had supposedly amassed in his criminal career, but the money complicates the case. Everybody seems to have heard about his ill-gotten fortune, even if it might not be real.
Jenny’s other problem is Officer Lance Callen, who can’t keep his mind on the job. The brass think they can solve the problem by removing the temptation instead of the problem. They send Jenny on temporary assignment to the sunny Kona side of the island. So can she help it when she is the one to find Cindy Otsaka hiding in plain sight in Kona, or when she also finds Caleb living in a tent on the beach?
But another suspect gradually appears. Someone is living in an improvised man cave in a Kona coffee warehouse. Now Jenny needs to learn who killed Cindy after the police had to let her go for lack of evidence. And how does a meth operation tie in, and will it solve Jenny’s other problem with Callen? The answers might be lurking in the lava tubes that honeycomb the island. Or, like so much in the devout Hawaiian islands, the solution might might go back to the Old Testament. Think Cain and ….
