If you like a thriller with a lot going on, Mark Troy’s The Splintered Paddle is right up your
alley. You’ve got a beautiful prostitute hounded by a dirty cop, a vicious pot
grower with a taste for young girls, and a newly released psycho convict
looking for revenge. Throw in a runaway teenager, date rape drugs, rape videos,
and a murder or two and there is more than enough to keep both private
investigator Ava Rome busy and the reader turning pages.
Rome, a retired military police officer, working in Hawaii
is first hired by the prostitute to help her deal with the cop who has been
harassing her. Then a local lawyer asks Rome to locate his daughter who has run
off. Meanwhile she begins getting crank phone calls, and a sadistic criminal
she helped to catch years ago before she retired has been released from San
Quentin and shows up in Hawaii. When she discovers the young girl with a local
drug dealer, she finds herself dealing with three very violent customers, and
it gets worse when all three seem to be working together.
Less a question of solving a mystery, the plot focuses on
how Rome will be able to deal with what seem like the overwhelming odds against
her. The local authorities offering little help, Rome is left to her own
devices, both to protect her clients and eventually herself. Though ex-military police, she is no Jack
Reacher; still she is a woman who can handle herself, and she does get a little
help from her friends. Beautiful, resourceful, tenacious—she is a heroine to be
reckoned with.
Hawaii, as the TV networks have discovered, makes a
sensational setting for a thriller. Not only do you have exotic scenery and
lavish hotels, but you have a place with a seamy underbelly as well. You can
have a film company coming to shoot on location; you can have Korean bars
filled with Asian B-girls. You can
feature hard bodied surfers; you can have bikini clad sun worshippers. It is
the kind of place where the surface beauty belies the ugliness beneath.
The Hawaiian setting is portrayed realistically. The
conversation of locals is loaded with patois, Hawaiian pidjin. Characters
represent the ethnic diversity endemic to the island. Local foods and customs
are highlighted. Whether it is the aumakua,
his guardian spirit, worn as an earring by one character, or the book’s
very title, the novel fairly reeks with local color.
The title, The
Splintered Paddle, refers to a principle of Hawaiian law based on an
ancient law of Kamehameha The Great which mandates the protection of those who
are unable to protect themselves. It is a symbol worn by the local police, and
its message is emblazoned on Rome’s business card: “The defenseless shall be guaranteed protection from harm.”
