Honolulu Weekly

386 pages, $15

Paul Malmont’s 2006 novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, an homage to period-piece pulp fiction, established Malmont as a writer to watch and put him on many end-of-year best book lists. Malmont’s latest effort, the historical drama Jack London in Paradise, advances his reputation as a novelist with a keen ear for vintage dialogue and an able hand at the literary page-turner.

Set mostly in the Hawaii of 1926, Jack London in Paradise finds the legendary writer and adventurer down and out in Honolulu after a total artistic and financial collapse. A desperate Hollywood producer comes to find London and win his approval for one last Jack London payday, but finds a job much bigger than the one he’d bargained for.

Malmont’s eye for the Islands is a bit hackneyed in places and may leave local readers wincing, but that’s par for the course in fiction written by and for those living abroad, and the portrait he paints of London–as well as the journey into Honolulu yesteryears, make this novel shine.