Engrossing non-fiction is difficult to write; rare and much appreciated are the non-fiction efforts well-crafted enough to "read like fiction" — as the blurbs like to say — and capable of capturing the interest of readers who aren't already caught up in the subject. A certain alchemy occurs when a talented storyteller is also a meticulous researcher; at some point, the author is so immersed in the material that he begins to tell the tale as though he had lived it. And the manuscript breathes. Think of Jonathan Harr's 1995 "A Civil Action," the best-selling book about illegal dumping and cancer clusters in Woburn, Mass.

The Massie story has been told many times. But only someone with Stannard's deep understanding of 19th and 20th century Island socio-political history could place the case in its proper context with all its complexities. It's a story Hawai'i citizens need to read, though this book, from a national publisher, will get a wider readership.

Stannard argues convincingly that the Massie case happened as it did because it happened where it did. Hawai'i's classist and racist (and he would say colonial) power structure was the perfect setting for an indulged and arguably deranged woman's self-serving lie to find willing support from government, military and business forces caught up in racial prejudice, political maneuvering and place-saving. The result was one of the most effective miscarriages of justice in American history.

It was so effective that, in a sense, it's still being carried out today: Ask the average Islander about the Massie case and you'll hear doubt and confusion, despite an investigation conducted in the wake of the trial by detectives from the Pinkerton Agency that disproved every one of the accusations. This information was so effectively suppressed by the territorial government and business interests that people today still wonder what happened to Thalia Massie.

THAILIA MASSIE

One of them — kidnapped by a party of Massie supporters, including her mother and husband — was murdered, nevertheless. And the people found guilty of that crime had their sentences commuted to one hour in police custody.

Stannard's book, as the title indicates, properly keeps the focus on this, often underplayed, aspect of the case.

In explaining how the case affected Hawai'i, Stannard goes beyond the widely known idea that it delayed statehood by 20 years. He argues, among other things, that it was this case that gave the term "local" its particular flavor. It was a term used to describe the accused rapists collectively. They were Hawaiian, Japanese and Chinese individually, but they represented the vast majority of non-white and often mixed-race Islanders who lived marginal lives in strained economic circumstances with little chance of improvement. Local became code for "one of us."

He also documents significant changes in politics and labor relations that followed the Massie case — brought about, he writes, by "a new sense of non-white solidarity," as though the silent majority, after witnessing the Massie travesty, had had enough.

In the end, he laments what he sees as the loss of idealism after statehood, with the entry of a new power structure — one that again largely excluded Hawaiians.