Hokuloa Road

Hokalua Road cover reveal & preorder information

Elizabeth’s next book is a crime novel set in Hawaii, arriving July 19, 2022 on Mulholland Books, and is available for preorder now! Check out the cover art and full synopsis below:

A young man is drawn into the dark side of paradise in this haunting and atmospheric mystery about the eerie secrets of one Hawai’ian island—and the lengths some will go to keep them.

On a whim, Grady Kendall applies to work as a live-in caretaker for a luxury property in Hawaiʻi, as far from his small-town Maine life as he can imagine. Within days he's flying out to an estate on remote Hokuloa Road, where he quickly uncovers a dark side to the island’s idyllic reputation: it has long been a place where people vanish without a trace.

When a young woman from his flight becomes the next to disappear, Grady is determined—and soon desperate—to figure out what's happened to Jessie, and to all those staring out of the island’s “missing" posters. But working with Raina, Jessie’s fiercely protective best friend, to uncover the truth is anything but easy, and with an inexplicable and sinister presence stalking his every step, Grady can only hope he'll find the answer before it's too late.

From award-winning writer Elizabeth Hand, a master of crime fiction known for her magnetic characters, seductive prose, and fearless excavations into the darkest corners of our world, comes a chilling and illuminating new novel about a place unlike any other—and the deadly cost of keeping it so.

Publishers Weekly interview about Hokuloa Road

Publishers Weekly chats with Liz about her upcoming novel Hokuloa Road, isolation, climate chance, and the Hawaii the tourists don’t see.

I’m fascinated by folklore, and setting determines so much about how a folklore develops. Dog spirits, the kaupe, are recurring characters in Hawaiian lore; I wanted to embellish while being respectful. Hawaii is a remote place that was a sovereign nation, and there’s a lot of politics around that. There’s a great deal of income disparity, as there is in Maine. There are wealthy Covid refugees who can afford to move to the islands, and then there’s also a terrible housing shortage—there are houseless camps, and quite a few resort employees, people in the service industry, just living on the beach, because they can’t afford a place to live.

Read the entire interview at Publishers Weekly.