The plot…eventually provides a thrilling revelation. Kirkus Reviews Amanda Wilcox is a beautiful young GMO activist who disappears paddleboarding on Kauai. Her plight becomes fodder for the tabloid media, especially in Manhattan where her father is a prominent lawyer. A famous actress named Turner Espray pledges to spare nothing to help find Amanda.
But it falls to the retired NYPD detective and P.I. Karl Standt to go to the Hawaiian island and fix a botched, seamy investigation. The detective finds a web of murky connections in the tropical paradise, hints of corruption that expose the island’s drug- and agro-financed underside.
Perry reprises his Karl Standt character here, but this novel can easily stand on its own. The island of Kauai is a character in itself ( the flat river moved with a hypnotic slowness, like heavy floodwaters ), and Perry effectively describes its culture, including the super-rich who view Kauai as a trust-fund playground, the surfing locals who personify the laid-back island vibe, and the plague of drugs that are harvested and sold there.
Perry depicts the different sides of island life through the perspective of New Yorker Standt, who’s out of his element but relies on his instincts…The plot…eventually provides a thrilling revelation. - Kirkus Reviews
Joining Standt on Kauai is Katie, a girlfriend and reporter, the hacker Church, Chris K, a surfing, pot-loving local investigator, as well as Vereen, a gonzo helicopter pilot who used to fly in Iraq. A burned-out ex-cop named Bruno Reilly is also looking for Amanda, or is he? He has a suspicious relationship with a pampered crew of execs partying on a yacht. They don’t mind that Amanda has disappeared. Her anti-GMO crusade is bad for business. Is she a shark fatality, or still alive, somewhere, on or off the ocean? The drug scene hangs over everything like bad weather. Church and iz have their own problems with an Ecstasy habit. The hacker, Katie, and Standt are immersed in an atmosphere of equatorial noir as they try to find out what happened to an All American girl.
