Kauai's beauty is stunning and at the same time serene, but deadly deeds can be done even in wondrous places.  In Fatal Paradise, the Kauai Police Department is faced with several murders in the span of a week, as well as a cataclysmic physical disaster.  The combination provides the police with an overabundance of mystery and adventure in what should have been the dog days of summer, as the following passages illustrate.

         It began almost immediately, as an involuntary cough.  Then another, and then an uncontrollable fit of coughing.  The tightening in his throat worsened, and his breathing became an audible rasp.  He stood up and started for the bathroom.  It was too great an effort.  The dark-skinned man fell to his knees, gasping loudly, staring in wide-eyed horror at the smiling visitor.  A moment later, the bird of paradise didn't matter any more, nor the banana leaves, nor the bungalow.  The spear of Adibi's life was plunging headlong into the darkness.

            Her head, badly battered, lay half in, half out of the water.  Tugged by the current, her short hair aligned itself in the general direction of the sea.  The two men waded in slowly, clumsily.  The stream pressed arhythmically against their ankles, and the rocks were slippery and irregular beneath their feet.  Cautiously, they lifted the ... body out of its stony cradle.  Its spiritless weight seemed more than could be accounted for by its slender proportions.

            Saga exhaled through partially closed lips and drummed his fingers against the tabletop....  "As of today, we're still at sea as to motivation.  Then, too, the modus operandi of the murders -- assuming the death today was a murder -- was different.  Two people shot, one possibly stabbed, one possibly asphyxiated.  It's going to take a while to solve them, and who knows what else is going to happen in the meantime."

   Iniki was tearing at the roof of the hotel, the sound of its destructiveness echoing in the high-ceilinged hall.  Before their eyes, the interior space was being transformed into a water garden, with rivulets and streams flowing out of the ceiling and over the balconies.  The hurricane had ripped away part of the upper structure of the hotel, and in the process pulled apart the sprinkler system.  Open pipes had pumped half a million gallons of water into hallways and bedrooms before the shutoff valves could be closed.

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            On these side roads, the nature of the litter changed/  This was a residential area, and the streets were full of roofing tin and shingles, furniture, books and magazines, compact disks, audio and video tapes, clothing, broken bottles and jars, two-by-fours, appliances and other indicia of civilized life being methodically disassembled by the unreasoning forces of Gaia.

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            Ininki's eye wall had come ashore....  The base of the seven-mile high toroid of energy was moving at more than twenty miles an hour across the coastal plain and up the hill, sweeping beaches clean of their sand, lifting chunks of asphalt out of the highway roadbed, uprooting trees and telephone poles, blasting windows, walls and furniture out of oceanfront hotels, snapping concrete cantilevers and bending steel supporting beams, lifting automobiles into the air and spinning them like twirlers' batons, rending resort condominiums asunder.