Kapaa, like most rural towns on Kauai and many in Hawaii, got its start in the 19th century as a sugar town. But, within five years, Kapaas sugar mill was gone; the little village almost disappeared. By the early 20th century, Kapaa was once again a thriving community. Self-reliant merchants and shopkeepers, first mostly Chinese and then Japanese, competed with the neighboring plantation store. Homesteaders populated the hills behind Kapaa, and two pineapple canneries offered employment. Several movie theaters provided alternatives to the bars and taxi-dance halls. By the 1970s, pineapple,...

In 1920 Honolulu, a series of human-sacrifice style murders of the elite occur, some of them at heaiu (temples). Thehooded killer leaves notes promising more murders to come and are signed: "Cult of Ku." Grant Kingsley, son of a prominent sugar baron, returns home to the islands after his heroic military service in World War One. His grandmother is angry with him because his mother left a death bed note which suggests his father was Hawaiian, not his sugar planter father. When she is brutally murdered Grant is arrested. Released from jail, Grant knows he must clear his name quickly because of...

When a sugar baron kicks John Tana off his farmland on Maui in the mid-1800s, the orphan Hawaiian seventeen-year-old feels the shock of the dramatic change in land control in Hawai'i. Western capitalism and private property clash with the communal lifestyle and sharing of the common people. Many Hawaiians lost their lands because the planters convinced a king of the need for individual farmlands for Hawaiians but, in reality, intended to make it so complicated few would do so. This led to the vast plantations on the islands and destitution for Hawaiians. John's story reveals the path of the...