{"id":9360,"date":"2021-11-09T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-09T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9360"},"modified":"2021-11-08T21:04:13","modified_gmt":"2021-11-09T02:04:13","slug":"blood-like-rain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9360","title":{"rendered":"Blood Like Rain"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Albert Tucher \u2013 In Al Tucher\u2019s latest Big Island Mystery, Hawai`i County police detective Errol Coutinho has his hands full from the first page. He\u2019s called out on a homicide case and discovers the victim is his wife\u2019s best friend, Eleanor Swieczak. He wasn\u2019t crazy about the woman, but his wife will be devastated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coutinho and his partner, Harlan Kim, have a lead suspect: Eleanor\u2019s new boyfriend, Jerry Wyatt. Not only does he have a murky past, he\u2019s disappeared along with Eleanor\u2019s Mercedes. Coutinho\u2019s wife Lucy is the best crime lab technician the department has, and she really wants to dig into this one. Over the course of the story, her science and her insights about her friend prove invaluable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Coutinho and Kim suspect a connection to the drug trade. Pakalolo\u2014Hawaiian weed\u2014believed by many to be the world\u2019s finest. At the top of the island\u2019s significant pakalolo enterprise is a well-established drug entrepreneur named Morrison, in his late middle age. If Wyatt\u2019s involved, Morrison will know. But he seems to have cleared out too. Rumor has it that he and another drug lord\u2014the violent but elusive Trondheim\u2014are waging a war off the coast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These rumors are substantiated when a body washes ashore on the once-lovely Kamilo beach. It\u2019s now caught in the gyre of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the area\u2019s unique currents deposit a constant stream of trash there. A volunteer cleanup crew discovered the body atop a pile of plastic garbage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Author Tucher\u2019s encyclopedic knowledge of the Hawaiian Islands comes constantly into play in these novels. They aren\u2019t stories that could happen just anywhere, and he does a great job weaving the unique settings into his plots. A body on a garbagy beach is just the start. A breakneck trip down the steep and narrow road into Waipi\u2019o Valley is enough to give you vertigo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Was Eleanor\u2019s death the first indication of a new drug war? Or, was her death a one-off, a car-theft gone wrong? The pieces start to look like they\u2019ll fit together when she\u2019s tangentially linked to the deaths of two reporters investigating the pakalolo business some twenty years earlier. The murders have started up again, and, as their investigation proceeds, Coutinho and Kim have an increasing number of bodies in the morgue that attest to the continuing trail of violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, Coutinho and Kim are trying to figure out an organized crime drug smuggling operation with ties to the mainland, reopening a double homicide everyone had given up on, and, getting back to the original subject, attempting to explain the death of Lucy\u2019s friend Eleanor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tucher has a knack for creating interesting characters, and may go a bit overboard here, with several sets of siblings and an improbable number of twins. Even a former wife of Coutinho\u2019s makes an unwelcome appearance. She is, of course, a twin. Family feuds are always the worst and seeing how the several families tangled up in this story treat each other, it will make you grateful if you\u2019re an only child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can read Tucher\u2019s novels for their complicated plots or for characters you\u2019ll come to enjoy\u2014Coutinho and Kim are solid partners, you\u2019ll like their boss, Lieutenant Tanaka, and a young female officer, Jenny Freitas, who \u201chad a knack for being in the right place at the right time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Albert Tucher \u2013 In Al Tucher\u2019s latest Big Island Mystery, Hawai`i County police detective Errol Coutinho has his hands full from the first page. He\u2019s called out on a homicide case and discovers the victim is his wife\u2019s best … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Blood Like Rain - Al Tucher's Big Island Mysteries immerse you in the culture of subculture of Hawaii. Drugs-murder-family feuds, treacherous women--this thriller has it all!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,3,632,126],"tags":[1133,409],"class_list":["post-9360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-mystery","category-police","category-reading-2","tag-al-tucher","tag-hawaii"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2qY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9362,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9360\/revisions\/9362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}