Hokuloa Road by Elizabeth Hand

 

Ms. Hand has won all sorts of awards in all sorts of genres, but this novel, at least, isn't really all that good. It wants to be a crime novel about a serial killer (whose reasoning is left boringly blank) and it wants to be a novel about the beliefs of the native Hawai'ians having real magical power, and it's not exactly a bildungsroman--the main is too old for that--but there's a thread six lanes wide of someone figuring himself out, finding himself, complete with a very complicated moral decision at the end (which is left boringly unexplored). The novel begins by moving from there the main starts to the actual situation of the novel with a speed that batters the ability to sustain disbelief, which does not serve the complicated cross-genre nature of the novel well; and the rest of the situation accrues narrative clutter at speed and in amounts that likewise do not serve it well. It's plausible Ms. Hand has written good novels, this is not one, it does not give me reason or confidence to dig much further.