Iced in Paradise is a cozy mystery taking place in Hawaii. It is the first of two novels in the Leilani Santiago Hawaii Mystery series and is the first book that I have read by the author, Naomi Hirahara. She is the Edgar-winning author of the Mas Arai mystery series and the L.A.-based Ellie Rush mystery series. Her Mas Arai books earned a best book of the year award from Publishers Weekly. Iced in Paradise was published in 2021.
The publisher's summary:
Leilani Santiago is back in her birthplace, the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, to help keep afloat the family business, a shave ice shack. When she goes to work one morning, she stumbles across a dead body, a young pro surfer who was being coached by her estranged father. As her father soon becomes the No. 1 murder suspect, Leilani must find the real killer and somehow safeguard her ill mother, little sisters, and grandmother while also preserving a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend in Seattle.
Iced was not as exciting as I had hoped. I struggled with the Hawaiian slang and could not always figure out what was being said. I wasted too much time trying to figure it all out and kept reading. However, the slang was too big of a disturbance for me. In the beginning I thought that it was pretty cool to learn all these new words. It became cumbersome though. I found it hard to decipher what the action was because it too was told to the reader through slang terms. The plot shown above in the summary is a good one. I just didn't see it and am disappointed with the book. I had high hopes for it due to the positive reviews but it just didn't click with me.
1 out of 5 stars.
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