is set on Oahu, home of almost nine-tenths of the population of Hawaii, and of the capitol city, Honolulu.  The multicultural stew of Honolulu provides great raw material for T.C. Lawrence's second mystery novel, which finds the Chase family in Hawaii again for the wedding of Niki Makana.  Niki's marriage to publisher C. B. Freeman reunites many of the characters in

     The full winter moon burned with cold fire.  It glared down at Li-Ann Low, and its smile struck her as uncharacteristically sinister.  Ghostly luminance glistened on the smooth leaves of the rubber trees that rose alongside the forest path.  Not far away, a stand of mature bamboo clattered like hollow bones, although there was hardly a breeze.  Around Li-Ann's neck, the Hasselblad hung on its wide strap, all elegant clumsiness as she walked.  The tripod in her hand was just clumsiness, no elegance.  It was easy to see her way in the moonlight, except where the inky shadows of overhanging trees obscured the trail.  At those places, she had to move slowly, her hand waving in front of her so as not to smack into an unseen obstacle, her feet shuffling so that she didn't trip, until she came into the clear again.  Through openings in the forest canopy, she could see the sky's northeastern expanse, where stars were slowly being gobbled up by a silvery cloud bank.  A fine rain sprinkled over her now and again, as puffs of gray gossamer sailed through the forest, on and off occluding the moon.
           Below her, the quiet lights of the Nu'uanu Valley were filtered by the vegetation past which she was walking.  Roofs of the valley neighborhoods bounced moonlight faintly back onto the steep, defining ridges.  She could see her home down there, the first house occupied by a Chinese in Nu'uanu, the house built by her revered ancestor, white against the darkness down the hill.  She would have preferred to be inside it, looking safely out on the valley view through its large windows; but a clear moonlit night in  the rain forest was a rarity, and she'd been waiting for years to photograph the relic under a full moon.
       [The above  passage serves both as a dark beginning and as an insight into Li-Ann's character:  a risk-taker, obsessive -- out alone in the rain forest at night, for what is at best not a very good reason.]
            A pair of wild pigs snuffled brazenly past her, their wiry pelts scraping against her leg.  She gasped, jumped back and almost tripped over the exposed roots at trailside.  A shiver seized her body as the thudding of porcine hoofs receded behind her.  Nu'uanu had its beauty, but it also had its ghosts.  Reports of supernatural sightings were commonplace in this region, some benign, some horrifying.  The rugged valley had been the scene of fierce fighting almost two centuries earlier, during King Kamehameha I's campaign to achieve dominion over all the Hawaiian Islands.  Screams of countless warriors being pushed to their deaths by the king's army had echoed from the steep ridge lines during that campaign.  In addition, the mausoleum of the royals sat at the foot of the Pali Highway, which bisected the Nu'uanu Valley, and homes that had belonged to long-deceased members of the royal families still stood in the valley.  The most elegant of these, Queen Emma's summer palace, a fine plantation-style home surrounded by beautiful gardens, kept stately watch over the drive through Nu'uanu up the Pali Highway from downtown Honolulu.  The most foreboding, the summer quarters of Kamehameha V, was now a disquieting skeleton that haunted a lonely clearing in the rain forest.  Ectoplasms with attitude, the shades of queens, kings and warriors from a time before Hawaii was overrun by foreigners, were now widely believed to stalk the Nu'uanu Valley at night.
      [I'm tempted to expand this paragraph, maybe break it into separate paragraphs, because there are so many different strands contained in it.  On the other hand, all the points are peripheral, and it's only the sum of them,  the fact that most readers will be uncertain of the allusions, and the mood that are important at the moment.  The details can be added later, when they're more relevant.  Requires more thought.]
            The path that Li-Ann was travelling now took her into the clearing that hosted the ruined summer home of the fifth Kamehameha.  The remains of the stone and stucco structure loomed jagged and roofless like a rough-hewn Stonehenge as she came into the grassy yard, maintained on a sometime basis by ethnic Hawaiian volunteers.  A pathway of smoothed lava rocks led to the yawning main entrance.  She stood staring at the wrecked walls for a moment, then spread the legs of her tripod and set it on the ground.  Removing the camera from around her neck and screwing it into the mounting head brought welcome relief to her shoulders.  She was concentrating on how to bracket her exposures -- intervals between five and thirty seconds, she thought --, and looking for the right angle -- low, but not so low as to make the scene grotesque, maybe just collapse the bottom segments of the tripod legs-- when all at once, a glow appeared deep in the forest.  Very faint at first, it grew by degrees as she watched. That's no flashlight, Li-Ann thought.  It was too diffuse, and it was flickering.  Perhaps someone was carrying a kerosene lantern.  Whatever it was was approaching her, and Li-Ann was already worried.
      [Another sentence or two needed here to convey the haunted feeling of this structure and its environment.]
            The sound of the wind moving on the ridge had grown louder, though she could hardly feel it in her hair .  Where she was standing seemed to be a becalmed area, a dead zone.  Even the trees at the margin of the clearing were motionless, as best she could tell, while a roar like a gathering storm was mounting all around her.  The advancing light grew, and as it did, she could hear above the tumult a rhythmic stomping, faint at first, but quickly becoming so loud that eventually she shook with each footfall.  And then she knew.  Li-Ann had doubted that there were things such as ghosts.  While not a disbeliever, she was to the core a hard-headed businesswoman, and preferred not to think about things intangible.  Yet her childhood had been rich in spirituality.  She was prepared to accept spirits if she saw them with her own eyes.  And these spirits she now saw with her own eyes.  These were not ghosts to be trifled with.  She knew she had only two choices if she wanted to avoid a horrible death: run as fast as she could away from the light, away from the clearing, before they saw her, or strip off her clothes and lie naked and still in the underbrush.  The latter choice was completely unthinkable to Li-Ann, though guaranteed to work by those who believed the legend.  But for the moment, she couldn't run either.  She was pinned in place, as if by an invisible restraint.  All she could do was watch them come: the Night Marchers.
            [Sightings of the Night Marchers, reported, obviously, by those who survived an encounter with those spirits, still occur on Oahu and elsewhere in Hawaii.  What has Li-Ann actually seen here?  Or has she actually seen anything?  Is she dreaming, for example?  I have an answer, but I'm not sure it's the right answer yet.
            The scene ends here, and as in Fatal Paradise,  action at a different local is intercut, and this intercutting will continue through most of the book..  This is a common technique in mass-market fiction, but is not adopted in the Quintet because it is common, but because the Chase family do, in their individual adventures, the work of what would be a single investigator in the usual mystery novel.]