What would it be like to everything you ever wanted? A hacienda on Maui with servants. To run your own company and have no one to report to and really never even have to show up? To be married to the most stunning woman imaginable? Would it be like heaven on earth or would it turn into a living hell? Harry Whittington, writing as Whit Harrison, brought us this story, told in the most vivid descriptions, a story of a woman no man could say no to on a magnificent island paradise.

Coles Cameron goes to visit his war-time buddy, Victor, who has a company on an plantation in Maui and running out of the rain into their house sees a naked goddess standing there before a full-length mirror. He is bewitched and knew he should have run back, "Back into the rain. Back to the launch. Back to Oahu. Back to the States." Whittington takes the reader into the hypnotic state that Coles finds himself in even when he suspects where this will all lead. Nothing could have prepared him for meeting Lani or for what she would do to him or what she had done to other's souls. His "head is whirling and mad dervishes were wheeling around behind [his] eyes. Her voice and laughter were music." He explains: "The liquor has done it, but it was more than that. It was the warm rain, the strange land, and Lani, standing, a nude goddess, before her mirror."

Whittington does a masterful job of taking the reader into the hypnotic jungle of Maui, the island paradise and the hot sizzling nightmare that Coles finds himself in. "No man could resist those damp, dark lips, those black eyes where he could read nothing but invitation, invitation swimming up from the depths of them."

This is a terrific noir tale set in the South Pacific and although it has, on its surface, some connection with Postman Always Rings Twice with the newcomer and the wife of his best friend who he can't resist and where that all leads, this story is Whittington's own and is imbued with his enormous writing talent. ( )