Books like The Musubi Murder — picked by fans

In 1931, Thalia Massie, the bored wife of a naval officer stationed in Honolulu, accused six nonwhite islanders of gang rape.

The trial loosed a storm of racist hatred and sexual hysteria nationwide (Hearst papers, I’m looking at you). But the evidence was scant – for one thing, she almost certainly had not been raped – and the trial ended in a hung jury.

Outraged that she hadn’t been believed, Thalia’s husband, mother, and friends then kidnapped and murdered one of the Native Hawaiian defendants as an “honor killing.” Caught in the act, the Massies got Clarence Darrow to defend them. 

He lost at trial but, scandalously, the all-white killers were released within hours. During the two years these events played out, racial divisions in Hawaiʻi became re-aligned – the concept of “locals” was born, embracing all nonwhite ethnic groups for the first time, and all in opposition to haoles … show more.

In this unusual novel, still in print after a century, Hula is a bewitching teenager raised on a Maui cattle ranch and proficient on horseback, among other talents. 

She attracts male attention, some acceptable by standards of the time (today she seems awfully young for her older suitors), and some markedly inappropriate even then. Drama ensues against a period-piece Maui backdrop: almost no cars on the island, few roads, and day-long steamer trips along the coast for sea travel from one town to another. 

The literary style and point of view, with the author hopping from one character’s head to another, often in a single paragraph, can at once surprise and delight modern readers. Armine von Tempski, who grew up on Maui, set other novels there, but Hula, her first, remains uniquely intriguing – especially for Maui lovers!  

In Hawaiʻi as elsewhere, bodies can end up in shallow graves – or so Hawaiʻi detective fiction would have it. 

When skeletal remains turn up, Mimi Charles, forensic anthropologist, sets out to recover them and unlock their secrets for the (naturally) less-expert Big Island police. The author is a forensic anthropologist herself, with plenty of real-world cases in Hawaiʻi and on the mainland to her credit, and she knows that in post mortem-focused mysteries, every forensic detail counts. 

She constructs an ingenious plot, in which a rare and boisterous dog plays a key part. Unlike more cautious authors who won’t dare to let their characters speak Hawaiian pidgin, Lasswell Hoff confidently sprinkles in just the right (and intelligible) amount. 

There’s a final and unique plot twist that makes the reader stop and marvel: How did the author manage to bring us here?  

Princess Victoria Kaʻiulani is among those brave real-life heroines who remain inspiring despite terrible tragedies, in Kaʻiulani’s case the theft of the Hawaiian kingdom in a coup by white planters in 1893 when she was only seventeen, and her shockingly premature death only six years later, at twenty-three, after being caught far from shelter in a chilling Hawaiʻi rain storm. 

In those six years, she became a figure on the world stage, welcomed by the royal houses of Europe as the forceful, articulate, and beautiful advocate (educated in England) pleading for the Hawaiian Kingdom’s formal diplomatic recognition and its return by the United States. 

U.S. annexation, an admitted wrong, might have been righted by her efforts had not Alfred Thayer Mahan’s relentless crusade persuaded Congress and the President that the U.S. needed Pearl Harbor to project U.S. naval power across the Pacific. 

Ironically, Kaʻiulani’s planned marriage to a Japanese prince,… show more.

English professor Lila Maclean is thrilled about her new job at prestigious Stonedale University, until she finds one of her colleagues dead.

She soon learns that everyone, from the chancellor to the detective working the case, believes Lila—or someone she is protecting—may be responsible for the horrific event, so she assigns herself the task of identifying the killer.
More attacks on professors follow, the only connection a curious symbol at each of the crime scenes. Putting her scholarly skills to the test, Lila gathers evidence, but her search is complicated by an unexpected nemesis, a suspicious investigator, and an ominous secret society.
Rather than earning an “A” for effort, she receives a threat featuring the mysterious emblem and must act quickly to avoid failing her assignment…and becoming the next victim.

I love the subtle humor in Cynthia’s series. She has a clever turn of phrase that keeps you giggling along… show more.

I love all of Rebecca Makkai’s work, but this novel, published earlier this year, absolutely blew me away.

Makkai is adept at keeping the pages turning, but it wasn’t just the story of podcaster Bodie Kane and the murder of her high school classmate that drew me in as much as the atmosphere. The novel is set in a New England winter, and Makkai does a fantastic job of using the darkness and isolation of the season to create thematic resonance.

I’ve only been to New England a few times and don’t know it well at all, but this novel makes me feel like I’ve been there.

This book should come with a warning: Moss’ delicious descriptions of her fictional shop’s offerings will send you running to the nearest cheese shop. Warm-hearted Willa Bauer has opened her French-inspired cheese shop, Curds and Whey, in Yarrow Glen, a small town in the beautiful Sonoma Valley. When she becomes the prime suspect in the murder of a vicious food critic, she must fight to clear her name.

Lisa Black’s Gardiner and Renner series juxtapose the worlds of law and lawless. Maggie Gardiner is drawn into an untenable alliance with Jack Renner. He is a police detective and a killer, bent only on making the world safer by killing criminals without the bother of arrest and trial. She, as a forensic investigator, finds herself in a catch-22; she cannot finger Jack without incriminating herself as an accessory. While shielding Jack’s identity she inexorably digs an even deeper legal crevasse for herself.

This was the first book I read by Sharon Bolton and it got me hooked on this author.

The book draws you into the lives of the residents of a small village where beneath the idyllic setting lurks secrets and malice. We follow newcomer Clara, a local vet, who is called upon when poisonous snakes turn up in the residents’ homes. The book has a brooding atmosphere which will leave you checking under the bed before you sleep.

Financial whiz Julia Snowden returns to her Maine hometown to rescue the family’s clambake business. Although she has financial acumen, she lacks true knowledge of how a clam bake works. She learns the hard way when a murder and a wedding reception don’t mix. I wasn’t familiar with the inner workings of clam bakes, from menu to preparation, but I learned with Julia. I also enjoy Ross’s writing style. The combination of the storytelling plus the facts interwoven make this a good book choice.