By the sea shore

The corpse with the diamond hand by Cathy Ace.  Murder mystery by a British-born Canadian author, good for a box on the list.  One down, 69 to go.

This is an ARC I picked up last time I was at PNBA.  Looking for things I could take on vacation and ditch when I was done (obviating the need to pack it home), I rediscovered this on my shelf.  The setting is an inter-island Hawaiian cruise, so appropriate for Maui beach-side reading.

This story was too incredible, as in "impossible to believe."  The main character is a criminal psychologist with a photographic memory who is married to a retired police detective.  Among the possible suspects, every single one had both motive and opportunity.  In order to finally ferret out the guilty party, the main character gathers everyone together to explain all the known facts and watch the bad guy overreact.  This is a series installment, but easy to jump in to: it's obvious that the other books all follow a similar story arch, so if this is your preferred type of book candy, good news.

I met the author at PNBA and she was lovely and personable.  She was keen to talk with book groups, if yours likes this kind of novel.

Bonus review: we are currently waiting to fly out of Kahului on Hawiian Airlines.  Today's check-in and airline service experience has been truly abysmal.  We had to walk back and forth across the airport twice because of inadequate signage.  The self-check-in machine would not let us pay for our checked bag.  A staff member eventually deigned to help us check out bag, but would not help us with our seat selection.  Skipping over the difficulty and unpleasantness of TSA in OGG (no space, poor signage, etc.), we walked directly to our gate.  I went to ask a question about our seating assignment.  After waiting in line for 10 minutes, I was informed there had been a(n unannounced) gate change.  The staff at the first gate could not help me.  After finding our new gate and again waiting an excessive amount of time considering the number of staff standing around, I was tersely informed that the airline has no guarantee to actually reserve the seats I booked online.  Hawaiian Airlines: not recommended under any circumstances.  The next 5 and a half hours should be fun.