It begins with an appreciation of Mother Nature and all its majestic beauty. In this case, it’s the landscape of Hawaii, a gorgeous state full of incredible vistas that also houses the potential for natural disaster. Ancient stories were created to give names and power to the might of nature, and were passed down from generation to generation as part of the oral history of the Hawaiian Islands.

With rumbling going on throughout the island, Chief Detective Koa Kane finds himself in a cemetery. He is there to visit the grave of Anthony Hazzard, whom he killed 30 years earlier. Revisiting this crime is one of the two major plotlines in TREACHERY TIMES TWO, the fourth entry in Robert McCaw’s outstanding series that only seems to get better with each new effort.

"What McCaw has done with his superior plotting is enough to keep readers’ heads spinning long into the night."

The recent quake that was a result of volcanic activity has wreaked havoc on a local cemetery, which is where the second mystery is introduced. The police notice a disturbed and disheveled body that was dumped there. It is covered with some sort of tarp, and the fingerprints were literally cut off, making identification quite difficult. Eventually they get a positive ID on the woman, Tiger Baldwin.

The investigation leads Koa’s team to X-CO, a high-tech military manufacturer. Could Baldwin have been silenced because of all the top-secret information to which she had become privy while working there? The answer may be found in what X-CO is actually building --- AI capabilities previously unheard of, and drone and virtual reality items that are years ahead of their time. They are currently working on a new military weapon called Deimos, a project so hush-hush that it’s very obvious Baldwin was killed as a form of silence.

Meanwhile, Hazzard’s grandson appears at the police station seeking to reopen the alleged suicide of his grandfather. Koa has no choice but to listen, yet the subterfuge involved in keeping his role in the murder a secret will become ever so tenuous. The tension alone might be enough to make him slip up, which simply cannot happen.

What McCaw has done with his superior plotting is enough to keep readers’ heads spinning long into the night. I have been on board with the Koa Kane series from the very beginning, and I am thrilled to see the author finally receiving some much-deserved national coverage for his work.