”;The Old Queen's Treasure”;

By Michael A. Herr

Lulu.com, 188 pages, $14.95. Available at Borders and Barnes & Noble stores, booklines.com and amazon.com

Michael Herr's intriguing little mystery posits that a Chinese treasure ship beat James Cook to the Hawaiian islands, a visit that resulted—as did Cook's 300 years later—with a dead captain. But the Chinese captain was interred in a lava tube—evidence!

Cut to modern times, when a Chinese archaeologist has formulated a theory about the Chinese reaching Hawaii before the British. He happens to reach the Big Island's Kohala Coast on an unrelated excavation assignment soon after a scurrilous local has stumbled on the Chinese captain's mummified remains. Will their paths cross? Will he put together the pieces that will make his career?

Does he deserve it is the third question, as he is clearly not a nice man. In fact, most of the men in this story are unsavory to some degree. For leavening, the story provides the nurturing, female-centric Pono family, which forms the connective tissue for the various threads of the tale.

The book is the third in Herr's “;Kohala Coast Thriller”; series centering on the Ponos. He's crafted an engrossing yarn, much of it rooted in the interwoven cultural tidbits about ancient burial practices, traditional reverence for the iwi (bones), antiquities, even the Hawaiian martial art of lua.