Thank you Hachette Audio for the ALC and @NovelSuspects & Mulholland Books, #partner, for the advanced copy of Hokuloa Road in exchange for my honest review.
Publisher: Mulholland Books / Hachette Audio
Published: July 19, 2022
Summary:
From Shirley Jackson Award-winner Elizabeth Hand comes a haunting and atmospheric new mystery perfect for fans of White Lotus , about a young man hired to work as a caretaker in Hawaiʻi who is drawn into the island’s darkest secrets.
Grady Kendall applies to work as a live-in caretaker for a luxury property in Hawaiʻi on a whim—it’s as far from small-town Maine as he can imagine. But within days he’s on a flight toward beautiful Kolihiʻi and his new home, a remote mansion on legendary Hokuloa Road.
With little to do, Grady settles into a lonely routine, one that slowly reveals a lesser-known side of Kolihiʻi’s reputation: it seems the island has long been a place where people go missing. When the next to disappear is Jessie, a young woman from Grady’s flight in, Grady becomes determined—and soon desperate—to figure out what’s happened to her, and to all those staring out of the “lost” posters that paper the island.
But maintaining an alliance with Raina, Jessie’s best friend, is anything but easy, and with a sinister presence stalking his every step, Grady can only hope he’ll find the answer before it’s too late . . . and that it might hold the key to what’s been terrorizing Kolihiʻi all along.
My thoughts:
This is a new-to-me author and so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I was drawn in by the amazing cover and blurb. Outright horror is not my usual genre of choice, but when it is mixed up with a thriller, it seems to work for me as is the case here.
I seem to be on a roll with atmospheric reads lately and I’m definitely not complaining one bit! This latest one takes us to Hawaii during the pandemic. It’s a slow-burn that works well here and our protagonist, Grady, moves across the country to take a job as a caretaker in a remote area. I loved that Hawaii took the mask wearing and the quarantining upon arrival so seriously. We might not have loved these actions when they were imposed on us, but we can all relate to them – and they really add such an interesting dynamic to this already tense story.
The setting really comes into play here as well as the quarantine and you can’t help but feel the creepiness of everything as Grady gets to know his surroundings. There is a bit of the supernatural at play here, but nothing too much. I’m not really a big fan of this element in general but it worked for the purposes of this story and I found myself completely engaged and wanting to see how it all plays out. You just get that feeling that something isn’t right and you have to stick with it to find out what it is. That’s how I felt with this story…I needed to see why the people went missing and I never would have guessed that ending!
This book definitely exceeded my expectations and I will absolutely be checking out this author’s backlist for sure!
Audio thoughts:
I was able to grab the audio of this one and what a great listen it was. The narrator, Kaleo Griffith, is new to me, but I thought he did a fantastic job bringing this story to life. He pacing and intonation were spot on and he really did a good job infusing just the right amount of tension into his voice as needed.
