Mahu Surfer

Written by Neil S. Plakcy

Narrated by Stan Jenson

Going undercover means lying to everyone he loves.

MAHU SURFER, the second book in my Mahu Investigations mystery series, sends gay Honolulu homicide detective Kimo Kanapa’aka back to his surfing past. His new boss asks the former competitive surfer to go undercover on Oahu’s North Shore to find the killer of three surfers. The catch: he can't tell any of his family or friends that he has returned to the force, causing him to lie, when he has just come out of the closet and begun to tell the truth about his life.

In his return to the North Shore, Kimo discovers trouble in paradise, from an epidemic rise in the use of crystal meth to increasing pressure on real estate prices. He also rekindles an uneasy friendship with a man whose sexual assault drove him into the police academy, and further into the closet, six years earlier. Readers will enjoy an exotic locale, plenty of aloha spirit and a dash of surf culture, as well as a slam-bang ending.

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for best gay mystery. Perfect for fans of Joseph Hansen, Michael Nava, and John Morgan Wilson. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Samwise Books
• Release date: Aug 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822625211

Neil S. Plakcy

Neil Plakcy is the author of over thirty romance and mystery novels. He lives in South Florida with his partner and two rambunctious golden retrievers. His website is www.mahubooks.com.

Reviews for Mahu Surfer

[Dr. Mike · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

While listening, I discovered that the entire chapter 21 was skipped, creating a great deal of confusion about what happened prior to the “Confronting Dario” chapter.

This story was not nearly as good as the first book. The plot was all over the place. To borrow a line from Annie Wilkes in "Misery" , “He didn’t get out of the cockadoodie car!” She screamed this after retelling how when she was a girl she went to weekly matinee serials and how she got angry when the writers "cheated" and ended the serial with an unbelievable, out of leftfield, all too convenient plot hole. This is how I felt at the end of this story. I read mysteries because I enjoy solving the puzzle. This can only happen if the writer acts in good faith, leaving crumbs that you collect until you finally form a solution. If a piece is deliberately withheld from the puzzle, this is misleading and does not make it a good mystery. This was often employed during "The Thin Man" movies. You did not get all of the pertinent information until the drawing room conclusion. But you were fine with this because Nick and Nora were likeable and fun so you just went along for the ride.

Kimo is a fine character but he is not very bright or disciplined and misses obvious clues while glaring at them up close. In addition, the story was not strong enough to enjoy the ride. I kept asking myself when did this story take place? Why doesn’t a cop carry a gun every time while on duty? Every cop I know, always carries, especially homicide detectives. Didn’t they have Google? Don’t they have cell phones?

This one was so much more “gay” than the previous book and that one actually included a forced outing. Most of the supporting characters were LGBT. I appreciate queer mysteries where they concentrate more on the suspense and mystery than the gayness of the main character or explicit sexual descriptions. It didn't take long before I got really tired of all of the slurs and rampant stereotypical characters. All of the bad guys were queer. Kimo just seemed to lack any kind of self-control, discretion, or discernment. His wanton promiscuity during the time of the HIV epidemic was uncomfortable. It wasn't titillating or arousing. The publisher was the one who made a direct comparison with Joseph Hansen. Kimo is no Dave Brandstetter and the writing just does not rise to that level or even to the level of the previous book.

However, my deepest disappointment was the narration. The first audiobook in the series was narrated by Joel Leslie, an exceptional SAG/AFTRA, award-winning voice actor and one of my favorite narrators. He specializes in accents and dialects and was really good at the Hawaiian and Asian dialects with clear distinctions between all of the characters. Stan Jenson, primarily a musical theater/comedic stage actor usually narrated non-fiction and historical books. He did not even attempt to tackle the accents. He describes himself as having an announcer’s voice and feels his greatest advantage is that he is gay and brings that sense of authenticity. He describes his process, “I rarely calculate what a character is going to sound like; a character enters a scene, starts talking, and most of the time I stick with whatever they sound like. However, I frequently get myself in trouble by not reading the entire book before I start recording it. Sometimes it seems that a character is just there for one page as a store clerk, taxi driver, whatever, so I give them a silly voice so they sound different than the principals. Then, it turns out they are on every page for the remainder of the book, and I’m stuck with the silly voice." His lack of preparation showed prominently in his performance. Good narration can cover a multitude of weaknesses in books primarily by bringing the dialogue to life and making it believable and natural. Bad narration highlights the book's shortcomings, specifically with the characters' discourse. It was incredibly stilted, awkward, and at times cringeworthy. At times, it got so bad that I actually downloaded the book from Kindle and used the speech-to-text feature which used a neutral, AI voice for narration. Sometimes this was an improvement.