In The Last Paradise, James D. Houston transforms a classic genre - the detective story - into a masterful narrative of a quest for spiritual & Cultural value. The time is 1986. Travis Doyle, a restless Vietnam veteran now working as an insurance claims adjuster in the Bay Area, is dispatched to Hawaii to investigate fire damage at a geothermal drilling site located in volcanic lava fields. The last thing he expects is to confront the mystery of an ancient spirituality & an indigenous world view that tests & challenges his own. On the Big Island he encounters a former lover, Evangeline Sakai, a mixed-blood woman who, after many years away, has returned hoping to reconnect with her ancestral past. She becomes Travis's guide through a realm of nature signs & uncanny coincidences. With her he comes to know a world in which two opposing views are in conflict: Earth as commodity (whose resources exist to be consumed) & Earth as ancestor (to be honored & revered).
The Last Paradise begins in San Francisco & pushes farther west, past the continent's edge, out into the Pacific. While its environmental drama is as contemporary as today's headlines, the novel resonates with the ancient themes of quest & transformation. A compelling cross-cultural love story, it is also a lyrical meditation on the volcano. Said to be the home of Pele, the fire goddess, Hawaii's volcano region is at once destructive & creative, deadly & healing. Its capacity to transform human lives is at the heart of this powerful tale of crisis & renewal. JAMES D. HOUSTON is the author of six novels, including Gig, Love Life, & Continental Drift, & several nonfiction works. He has been a visiting professor in California, Oregon, Michigan, & Hawaii.
His works have earned numerous honors, among them a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, an NEA Writing Grant, the Humanitas Prize, & a 1995 Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy. He lives & writes in Santa Cruz, California. "Houston is a superb storyteller. To my knowledge, there is no other book like this."--AL YOUNG, author of Seduction by Light & Drowning in the Sea of Love: Essays on Music.