The Chase family was an ordinary American family -- dysfunctional and spoiled by privilege -- until they picked the wrong time to travel to Kauai.  Murder, intrigue, a deadly hurricane, and adventure that tested the limits of their endurance change them forever.  These excerpts from Fatal Paradise introduce the Chases at moments in which bad decisions could be fatal, and in which a mystery they seem unable to escape -- in a Hawaii they don't truly understand -- overwhelms their vacation trip to paradise.

Stella, the spiritualist: Clawing and crawling upward with only seconds to save herself, Stella felt for the first time what it was like to have one's life in the balance. All of her energy was focused on surviving.  The roar in her ears drowned out all other sound.  She saw nothing but the path ahead of her and, in the corner of her vision, the demon.  Fifty yards away.  Twenty.  In a heartbeat, it was on her!  She leapt for the trunk of a mango tree that had grown almost horizontally out of the hillside before angling upward, and flung her arms around it just as the flood caught hold of her legs.  It chewed at them, tossed them against the earth, pulled them out into the stream, struck at them with flotsam.  She fought back.  The more the torrent sought to dislodge her, the more tightly she clung to salvation.  Even though she believed that she had lived many lives before, and had many left to live, Stella Chase was not ready to part with this one just yet.

Liz,the adventuress: "Maybe I wasn't explicit enough."  Race stared at Liz solemnly.  "The Xerxes people are very dangerous."
            Liz stared back equally solemnly.  Then she turned back to the counter, picked up her chopsticks, scissored them into her bowl and captured a cluster of Japanese noodles.  She pulled them out of the liquid, bent her head slightly toward them, and brought the working end of the chopsticks to her mouth.   Then she slurped the noodles as she had learned to do in soba shops in Tokyo.  "As dangerous," she asked while she chewed, "as jumping out of an airplane at eleven thousand feet without a parachute?"
            Race straightened and sat speechless and, except for the blinking of his eyes, motionless.  He inhaled, whistled and inhaled again.  "You did that?"

Janet, the divorcee:  The men were wrestling on the sodden earth.  She pushed the trigger guard out of the way, raised the pistol, and fired.  The kick almost caused her to drop the thing. Her shot was not aimed at the kidnapper, for fear of hitting Saga; but its report was enough to divert the goon's attention.  She staggered forward against the elements, as Saga wriggled free and jumped to his feet again.
            The stocky assailant rose.  Saga was in front of him, Janet coming up from behind.  He jabbed the knife toward Saga and stepped sidelong around him.  "Don't move," Janet screamed in a voice she'd never used before, a voice of such elemental rage that it frightened even her.  "Drop the knife."
            The man took another step.
            Janet stopped at the rear of the Chevy, held the gun in front of her, sighted down the barrel at the figure -- Oh, God! -- and fired.

Andrew, the lawyer: About ten minutes into the climb, a cane truck, large, blocky and yellow, came barreling down the driveway toward him, hauling a heavy-ribbed trailer filled with burnt stalks piled to a height almost double the height of the truck itself.  Its exhaust pipes blasted a brown miasma into the air above the cab, and the road behind it was obscured by a thick cloud of dust thrown up by its oversized tires.  As the distance closed between the two vehicles, it seemed to Andrew that the diesel might be out of control, or worse, intentionally aiming at him.  He swerved sharply into the stands of cane at the side of the road.  The truck did not slow down.  It careened toward him.  He held his breath.  The vehicle was nearly on him.  He envisioned the impact crushing his skull, the massive wheels flattening him and his car to the thickness of aluminum foil.  He opened the door with the thought of running into the cane field, but by then it was all over.