Set on its author's home island of Maui, this contemporary thriller concerns a wealthy Maui artist with a colorful background and eclectic interests. Sky Shafer has a successful career, a beautiful new girlfriend, a respected place in the community (not to mention an impossibly cool name). But he's also got an ex-girlfriend who'd like to see him go the way of her three husbands — to the morgue. A bit stiff and adjective-laden, but the plot moves right along and it's fun to read about familiar settings in a novel.

You're hooked from the first scene by this fictional story involving a real-life character, the late charismatic labor leader Walter Kupau. Written by the carpentry union's former legal counsel, now an attorney in private practice, the book has a preposterous and captivating plot involving love gone bad — very bad. Aquino has a knack for crisp dialog and the telling detail that snaps a character into focus. Her sense of humor is fine-tuned. There's a moral here, too. And in the end, as the Kupau character says, "Everybody gets what's coming to them."

The author, father of The Advertiser's environmental reporter and Kaua'i correspondent, is a retired agricultural consultant who researched pineapple throughout his career. This well-designed book punctuated with dozens of pictures explains how a nonnative fruit became so deeply associated with the Islands, and tracks the history of pineapple plantations from boom days to lean times, describing how these businesses have adapted to survive.