A product of Hawai’i Kai in East Honolulu, Scott Kikkawa writes noir detective stories set in postwar Hawai’i, featuring 442nd veteran Nisei Detective Sergeant Francis “Sheik” Yoshikawa. His critically acclaimed debut murder mystery, Kona Winds (Bamboo Ridge Press), was released at the end of 2019. Red Dirt, his second full-length novel, was published two years later. Both were featured in HONOLULU Magazine’s list of “Essential Hawai’i Books You Should Read.” His third novel Char Siu came out in 2023.

Winner of an Elliot Cades Award for Literature and honored with a selection for one of the “Other Distinguished Stories of 2021” in the 2022 Best American Mystery and Suspense anthology, the New York University alumnus is currently a federal law enforcement officer and lives with his family in Honolulu. He serves as a columnist and an Associate Editor for The Hawai’i Review of Books. For more of his writing, follow his Substack, Honolulu Blotter.

Wing Tek Lum is a Honolulu businessman and poet. Bamboo Ridge Press has published two earlier collections of his poetry: Expounding the Doubtful Points (1987) and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2012). With Makoto Ōoka, Joseph Stanton, and Jean Yamasaki Toyama, he participated in a collaborative work of linked verse, which was published as What the Kite Thinks by Summer Session, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 1994.

The Oldtimers

by Wing Tek Lum

Wing Tek Lum’s third collection of poetry, The Oldtimers, imagines life in Honolulu Chinatown circa 1900. Lum gives voice to the forgotten pioneer generation of sojourners and settlers, detailing the trials and temptations of this bachelor society living far from their homeland—their hard work, their diversions, their challenges, and, even amidst the notorious plague and fire, their perseverance.

Celebrated for its finely drawn imagery, emotional resonance, and historical sensitivity, Lum’s poetry captures and illuminates the overlooked nuances of daily life. Verses in The Oldtimers reflect on themes of displacement, labor, solitude, familial duty, cultural inheritance, and the quiet resilience required to preserve identity and tradition amid the islands’ constant transformation.

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Kona Winds

The first novel featuring Honolulu Police Department homicide detective Francis Hideyuki Yoshikawa—a Nisei veteran who tries to keep the war behind him and a glass of whiskey in front of him. Known as “Frankie” to family and friends, he’s been saddled with the nickname “Sheik” by a mainland co-worker who found his last name too hard to pronounce.

It’s the summer of 1953, and a young Japanese woman is found dead in Honolulu Harbor—the kind of case that could kill Frank’s career, with pressure from the top to leave it alone and let the investigation sink.

A twisted trail of clues takes him through old money, political secrets, and fallout from a bitter dock and sugar strike. From smoky bars to mansion-lined hills, and union halls to club halls, Frank uncovers a forbidden romance, an influential kamaʻāina haole family desperate to protect its legacy, and the hidden levers of privilege that hold the class divide in place.

In a city where the struggle between labor and power threatens to pull everything under, Frank finds himself weighted by a past he can’t wash down. The deeper he dives into the case, the darker it gets—and somebody’s hoping he won’t resurface.

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Red Dirt

In this follow-up to Kona Winds, detective Frank “Sheik” Yoshikawa is called to investigate a charred, dismembered body found in a remote sugarcane field. As he traces the victim’s past, Frank is drawn into the uneasy world of a local communist study group already under surveillance, where suspicions run high and fear collides with ideology.

Cold War paranoia is building, tensions are simmering across the islands, and Frank finds himself caught in the fault lines of a Hawai’i grappling with its plantation past and colonial legacies, while facing the uncertainties of looming American statehood. Lies are piling up, leads are running dry, and the whiskey isn’t strong enough to make the double-crossing go down easy.

Red Dirt blends the brooding intensity of True Detective with the bite of classic noir, capturing the layered shadows of postwar Honolulu with slow-burning suspense, sharp dialogue, and a detective who knows better than to expect a clean case.

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Char Siu

Chinatown, Honolulu, 1954.

Homicide detective Frank Yoshikawa has seen plenty of bad deals. But when he steps in as a temporary bagman, collecting protection money from brothels and gambling joints, it’s more than he bargained for and dirtier than he meant to get. In “Hell’s waiting room” above a chop suey restaurant on Maunakea Street, violence explodes through a beaded curtain, and someone important ends up dead.

Frank is caught between organized crime and disorganized law—between the mob’s demands, a department riddled with corruption, and federal investigators determined to bring someone down. The further he falls, the more he’s forced to confront what he’s willing to compromise and what it costs to walk the line when people on every side are crooked.

With a keen eye for the political tensions of 1950s Honolulu, Kikkawa blends historical detail with crime fiction grit and delivers a hard-boiled mystery layered with moral complexity and cultural insight. Char Siu is Scott Kikkawa’s third Hawai’i noir novel.

Link to purchase through our distributor, Itasca Books.