Iced in Paradise is a cozy mystery taking place in Hawaii. It is the first of two novels in the Leilani Santiago Hawaii Mystery series and is the first book that I have read by the author, Naomi Hirahara. She is the Edgar-winning author of the Mas Arai mystery series and the L.A.-based Ellie Rush mystery series. Her Mas Arai books earned a best book of the year award from Publishers Weekly. Iced in Paradise was published in 2021.

The publisher's summary:

Leilani Santiago is back in her birthplace, the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i, to help keep afloat the family business, a shave ice shack. When she goes to work one morning, she stumbles across a dead body, a young pro surfer who was being coached by her estranged father. As her father soon becomes the No. 1 murder suspect, Leilani must find the real killer and somehow safeguard her ill mother, little sisters, and grandmother while also preserving a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend in Seattle.

Iced was not as exciting as I had hoped. I struggled with the Hawaiian slang and could not always figure out what was being said. I wasted too much time trying to figure it all out and kept reading. However, the slang was too big of a disturbance for me. In the beginning I thought that it was pretty cool to learn all these new words. It became cumbersome though. I found it hard to decipher what the action was because it too was told to the reader through slang terms. The plot shown above in the summary is a good one. I just didn't see it and am disappointed with the book. I had high hopes for it due to the positive reviews but it just didn't click with me. ( )

diverse mystery fiction set on Kauai, Hawaii (author is not native to the islands but has had significant help in writing some of the dialogue in pidgin, and is thorough in her research).

I loved this--a fun mystery series kicks off with a murder in Leilani's family's shave ice shop. The various characters are nuanced and would be easy to spend another several books reading about. Recommended to me by another reader, and now I can recommend it to you. ( )

Leilani Santiago has returned home to Kaua'i, to assist with the family's shave ice stand in the wake of her mother's MS diagnosis. Her father is an aging surfer, now hawking a surf based clothing line and mentoring other young surfers on the circuit. When star surfer Luke's arrival to the small island quickly turns into murder, Leilani, headstrong and with strong family ties, wants to help her father out, as he is the number one suspect This was a well paced mystery. The setting was described very beautifully, I have never been to Hawaii, but feel I know a bit more about Kaua'i, land rights and all of the good food. Hirahara details many of the pidgin/Hawaiian/Japanese words used in the story at the back in a glossary. I wish I had noticed it earlier, but it didn't take long to get into the rhythm of the dialect. ( )