ISLAND BOOKS
'Ruby Tuesday' will thrill mystery lovers any day

By Wanda A. Adams
Assistant Features Editor

"Ruby Tuesday" by Baron R. Birtcher. Durban House, hardcover, $24.95; paper, $15.95 Book signings Noon today, Borders Books & Music, Waikele 2 p.m. today, Borders Books & Music, Ward Centre

On a recent five-hour trip to California, the second Mike Travis novel from Big Island resident Baron R. Birtcher kept me blissfully distracted until we touched down in Orange County, by which time I'd almost raced through the book.

In this outing, Travis, a hapa-haole ex-cop newly returned to Hawai'i from Los Angeles, finds himself up to his neck in the murders of an old friend's wife, a legendary rock star and the rock star's entourage, the bloodbath having happened at his family's Honaunau home.

The mess is somehow mixed up with one of pop music's greatest mysteries: What happened to the master tapes for the long-awaited last album of the mega-group Stone Blossoms, tapes that disappeared on the day that the Blossoms' charismatic leader died in a fall (a jump?) from a hotel balcony?

The police in Kona make it clear they don't want any help from the big-city detective, even if he is hapa and speaks passable pidgin. But Travis' friend Tino Orlandella is suspected of the crime so he has no choice but to gnaw away at the puzzle.

This isn't a perfect novel. The pidgin dialogue doesn't always work. Pidgin speakers don't say "What for you did that?" They say "How come you wen make li'dat?" or "What you did dat foah?" or "You wen do whaaaaat?"

And I had trouble believing in a couple of developments. Would Travis, a stand-up guy, really fall into bed with a sultry but suspicious character when he is supposed to be taking care of his friends' daughter, effectively orphaned by her mother's murder and her father's arrest?

Still, Travis is an interesting one, with an intriguing history that Birtcher is fleshing out in each book. The interaction between Travis and his friends is easy and rings true. The storyline is tight. And Birtcher understands the rules of the detective novel: that the hero has to be able to take a bullet and blow right past it, that there must be plots within plots and people who aren't what they seem. The end is satisfying but I continued to wish that we had learned more about Ruby, the murdered woman who was Travis' boyhood crush.

With the right breaks — always a tricky matter in publishing — Mike Travis might take his place alongside Jonathan Kellerman's Dr. Alex Delaware and John Lescroart's Dismas Hardy as a crime-solver with a following.