A Bird in the Hand

The body of a young woman is found in a dump in American Samoa. Then the prime suspect in her death is found half-eaten by sharks. Natural justice? Native justice? Or something else entirely? Lieutenant Han, a Korean-American homicide detective on loan to this remote South Pacific island nation, is also its only trained investigator. Born in one culture, raised in another, married into a third and now working in a fourth, Han takes nothing for granted about why people kill each other. Even so, these two deaths make no sense. Meanwhile, Han's estranged Japanese wife is back in Samoa, apparently more interested in an American ecologist than her husband, and the woman doctor Han fell for in his wife's absence seems to be falling for the hospital's new pathologist, a long-distance ocean sailor from South Africa with some unique experience in third-world killing fields. As the answers to Han's questions emerge from the cultural chaos like the ghosts that haunt Samoan forests, he...