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MAHU SURFER
by Neil S. Plakcy
Alyson Books, August 2007
317 pages
$14.95
ISBN: 1593500076


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Three surfers on Oahu’s North Shore, two men and a woman, have been killed by a sharpshooter. The manner of their deaths seems to be the only commonality among the cases, and there is no clue whether they were murdered because they were surfers or for entirely different reasons. Local investigators have come up strangely lacking in leads. Therefore, Honolulu police detective Kimo Kanapa’aka is dispatched undercover to investigate not only the murders but also the local police officers, to be sure they are not somehow involved in a cover-up.

Besides his detective skills, Kimo’s great asset is that he is a surfer, and had even once considered going professional. Thus, he has a natural 'in' with witnesses that the local police lack. It is also easy to send him undercover in plain sight. Since he was suspended just a few weeks earlier and has since been transferred without fanfare to his new station, his supervisor asks him to let on that he is taking time out to consider his next career move.

Kimo’s immediate response is: "I can’t do it. You’re asking me to lie to everyone who matters to me [his family and friends]. I can’t do that, not after what I went through just to be able to tell the truth." For Kimo, as was recounted in MAHU (2005), the first novel in the series, was outed as a gay officer who acted inappropriately upon his discovery of a body behind a gay bar. Now, with his new assignment, he finds himself in the paradoxical situation that he can be out sexually, with his supervisor’s approval, but must be closeted professionally, just the reverse of the way he has led his life till now. It is an ingenious twist.

Free to openly visit gay hangouts, Kimo starts making a circle of new friends. As a result, he becomes another in a long line of gay detectives to discover the resources that a gay grapevine has to offer, for it cuts across class, race, economic status, and professions. He learns all sorts of vital information that the local officers had been unable to unearth and is able to start connecting the dots between the victims. Kimo sums up: "Behold the power of the homosexual." His two best friends, both straight, one an accomplished hacker who inadvertently penetrates his disguise, also aid what has essentially become a private investigation.

Simultaneously, Kimo, for the first time in his 32 years, begins actively to explore his sexuality. When he meets up with his former surfer buddy Dario Fonseca, who remains obsessed with Kimo, he is forced to come to terms with his past and what drove him into the closet and perhaps caused him to join the police in the first place. Able finally to connect with others on both a sexual and an emotional level, Kimo finally discovers other joys of the body beyond what sports have provided.

After one of the men he has an affair with becomes the sharpshooter’s fourth victim, Kimo reviews his future and his career for real rather than in pretense. Because of his association with the victim, he becomes the logical suspect in the eyes of the local police. He then discovers: "This whole case was giving me a new perspective on how people view the police." But the murder also gives Kimo a renewed sense of purpose: "That whether I could flash a badge or not, I cared about righting the wrongs of the world, about speaking for the dead and making sure that their killers did not go unpunished."

For a mystery carrying such a heavy personal load to work, the reader must care about the characters, and the author succeeds in making Kimo, his family, and his close friends, old and new, likeable people. The setting allows us to visit several intertwining cultures and milieus (the surfing, the native Hawaiian, the gay scene) mixed in an unusual way. The pacing is brisk. Scenes of comedy relieve the brooding sense of an unknown menace hovering over the greater part of the novel. The ending is rushed and perhaps a bit contrived, but Kimo’s journey is ultimately a satisfying one.

Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, September 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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