Return of the Ghost Killer is Volume I of The Ghost Killer Trilogy, a contemporary novel series inspired by the 15th-century Hawaiian legend of Lāna‘i’s ghost killer.

Set against the lush backdrop of modern Lāna‘i, this first volume follows the descendants of pineapple workers, fishermen, maids, cowboys, cooks, and clerks, all entangled in a gripping community saga. When an island-wide search for an elderly hero of the plantation era coincides with the mysterious death of the island’s notorious “bad boy,” the investigation forces residents to confront their own personal ghosts—of memory, imagination, dream, and regret.

The haunted include a disabled athlete convinced he is unworthy of the woman he has always loved, a divorced mother returning to the island with two children, a former boom spray operator with a failing heart and unsettling visions, an autistic-seeming 11-year-old searching for a father he has never known, and a centenarian pensioner tormented by both tragedy and fantastical dreams. Together, their stories paint a vivid, haunting portrait of contemporary Lāna‘i, where past and present, myth and reality, collide.

Praise for Return of the Ghost Killer

“In his 1959 bestseller Hawaii, James Michener builds his titular island from the magma up. With Return of the Ghost Killer, Steve Heller doesn’t go that far back, yet he has done something just as impressive: he’s built a novel about Hawaii (specifically the island of Lāna‘i) that is in equal measure an historical saga, a coming-of-age tale, and a metaphysical mystery in which the visible dead are as earthily authentic as their living descendants. Whether by ghosts or those haunted by them, real life is lived on every page.”

—Peter Selgin, author of Duplicity and A Boy’s Guide to Outer Space

“Steve Heller is a great storyteller and Return of the Ghost Killer is a great novel. Moving, funny, spiritual, and earthy, it takes on great movements in history in a small corner of the world, the Hawaiian island of Lāna‘i, with unforgettable people. The main character, Albert Degamo, says most of life goes on in people’s heads, and this story demonstrates it, progressing deeper into people and their pasts as well as the present. Many stories, such as Hishashi’s, are tremendously moving—they made me think of other authors who go deeply in the heart, like Faulkner, Kawabata, and Flaubert.”

—Robert Shapard, author of Bare Ana and Other Stories, co-founder of Mānoa, and co-editor of many sudden and flash fiction anthologies from W. W. Norton

“The ghosts in Return of the Ghost Killer are subtle, vague, inscrutable.  But they leave a magical mist over the entire Hawaiian Island of Lāna‘i.  Steve Heller’s prose is clean, tight, and unintrusive.  He lets the characters breathe and wonder and ache.  Take several days reading this book. Listen to the cadence and twisted wisdom in the characters’ dialogue. Relax with the narration that gives us the hearts and minds of these islanders. Expect magic.”

—Jim Sanderson, author of El Camino Royale and other grit lit novels

 “Steve Heller’s community saga, Return of the Ghost Killer, explores how we often carry our mistakes into the future and repeat them. As one character posits: ‘Why don’t people learn from the past?’ I fell in love with these flawed, genuine, unstoppable characters. This ambitious novel covers all the hallmarks of a good, can’t-put-it-down book: life, death, revenge, ghosts, a missing person, family secrets. What more could a reader ask for?”

—Flannery O’Connor Award winner Anne Panning, author of the collections Super America and The Price of Eggs and the novel Butter

“The verisimilitude of The Return of the Ghost Killer is powerful, and part of that reality for some of Steve Heller’s characters involves ghosts, who come in various forms including corporeal manifestations of the dead and in vivid, haunting memories… Heller also gives the reader a rich sense of place in the manner of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead and Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Heller cherishes the small details of his characters’ everyday lives, and in these particulars, he unearths the universal so that Lāna‘i becomes familiar to any reader anywhere.”

—Mark Spencer, author of A Haunted Love Story and The Weary Motel

“Central to this excellent novel are unlikely likeable characters, places, and things including a wounded Pinelad, a wannabe rock band, single moms, a pusher with a bad attitude and conscience, a waif, a defunct pineapple plantation, and two ghosts. In other words, this is life on Lāna‘i where, in Albert Degamo’s thoughts, ‘You could never tell what was going to wash up on the shore or when.’ Life on Lāna‘i, as Albert and Steve Heller surely know, is a quotidian Butterfly Effect. Often funny and sometimes sad, this is one finely executed work from the author of The Man Who Drank a Thousand Beers.”

—Jim Barnes, American Book Award-winning author of Sundown Explains Nothing

“A triumphant expression of the storyteller’s art, Return of the Ghost Killer will beguile readers from its opening pages to its remarkable conclusion. The members of the small kingdom of Lāna‘i live, love, die, and transmogrify in the ways of memorable fiction, taking their place alongside figures who have escaped from the page and endure in our imaginations. And as if that weren’t enough, Steve Heller creates a metaphysical bridge between the living and the dead, showing that the connection between us and loved ones exists in a profound dynamic state—never wholly gone, forgotten, or vanquished.”

—Pat Matsueda, author of Tailspin and Other Stories and former managing editor of Mānoa Journal

“Steve Heller’s Return of the Ghost Killer is a delicious hybrid of mystery, bildungsroman, and ghost story. The ghosts of the island of Lāna‘i take many forms, from old men sitting on a bench peacefully recalling plantation days to the memory of a child being struck by a speeding scooter. Each character’s story is told with empathy and depth, weaving through the complexity of family and community life, revealing how we negotiate challenges, tragedies, disappointments, and secrets of the past. While many of the characters ache to leave and do something more, others dig in with roots to the land, community, and people who raised them. I can’t wait for rounds two and three of the trilogy!”

—Kase Johnstun, author of Cast Away and Let the Wild Grasses Grow

“In Return of the Ghost Killer, we follow eight haunted working‑class residents whose lives—Filipino, Japanese, and Hawaiian—intertwine across generations. The spirits in these pages are the lingering presences that shape a community as surely as its prevailing winds, its histories, and its silences. Heller lets the supernatural emerge from the land itself: from the whirring of insects in the dark, the static of a radio searching for distant voices, the flicker of a campfire whose meaning shifts depending on who is watching. The protagonists’ conflicts converge in a final movement that is both haunting and deeply human. Return of the Ghost Killer is a luminous exploration of inheritance, courage, and the ways the past keeps speaking to us, whether we are ready to listen or not.”

—Darren DeFrain, author of The Salt Palace and Inside Out

“Return of the Ghost Killer is a richly imagined, deeply rooted novel set on the Hawaiian island of Lāna‘i. Steve Heller captures a community in transition with rare intimacy, its humor and grief, the pressure of change, and the stubborn presence of what refuses to disappear. Luminous and haunting, this is a story about inheritance of land, memory, and myth, and what it costs to belong to a place being remade.”

—Andre Hardy, former NFL running back and author of the crime novel Tear the City Down

“Steve Heller’s the Return of the Ghost Killer, is a surprising, haunting, and beautifully crafted novel. For those of us who have lived our whole lives on the mainland, it is an education in Hawaiian history and folklore, with characters whose lives intertwine in vivid, unique, and refreshing ways. I can’t express how much I enjoyed the book’s complexity and beauty, which enthralls on every page. Truly a stunning first book of a trilogy that I can’t wait to finish.”

—DeAnn Jordan, author of Deadly Birds of the Soul and the forthcoming The Hands of Ghosts

“The modern Hawaiians of Lāna‘i in Steve Heller’s magnificent and beguiling novel, Return of the Ghost Killer, make a tart human cocktail: a mix of indigenous natives, and generations of Japanese, Filipino, Chinese immigrant labor, each ingredient bringing its own history and cultural tang to this society of descendants. Heller’s intimately drawn ‘now-days’ characters live quite naturally with a membrane-thin awareness of ‘before-time’—the glory days of Hawai‘i’s pineapple industry—where ghosts may appear as plainly as any neighbor, and indicate perplexing judgments or instructions. Heller’s writing sneaks up on you until you realize it’s controlled, powerful, and beautiful; the landscape of Lāna‘i is as intimately drawn as a beloved bedroom. With the accretion of its everyday-yet-magical moments, Return of the Ghost Killer is a masterful epic of place and character.”

—Peter Nichols, author of The Rocks and Evolution’s Captain

“Some say a controlled tone is Heller’s superpower. And it is. But there is another. Like the armored artichoke, Heller too has a tender heart. That is on display here, and it is a joy. It is delicious.”

—Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas, author of Elizabeth’s City

“Composed from the island’s history, folklore, natural science, and sociology, Return of the Ghost Killer is a love song to Lāna’i. On this tiny island, as the tourist trade grows in the wake of the collapsed pineapple plantation, everyone thinks they know everything about everyone. Pension men gather each morning outside the Blue Ginger Café, their numbers dwindling with the passing years. Albert Degamo distributes keys across the rental car counter, dreaming of making music on Maui. Johnny Galang cruises the main drag, selling marijuana as his mother slowly succumbs to cancer. They’re all stuck on this island. Same oh, Same oh. Yet a surprising number of secrets swirl beneath the surface of this tight community. And a surprising number of ghosts are intent on drawing truth to light. Sometimes, it can be hard to tell the ghosts from the living, as in the case of the strange boy who has suddenly appeared around town. Return of the Ghost Killer is a tale of second chances and quiet courage, asking the question: Is joy something to which we must aspire, or is it something we need only accept. Steve Heller brilliantly talks story on the page, making this unique world familiar and spellbinding.”

—Julie Hensley, author of Five Oaks and Landfall

“Even to reasonably well-traveled and well-read Americans, Hawai‘i remains something of a lush but stereotypical paradise. With Return of the Ghost Killer, Heller rips back the veil and reveals a Hawai‘i even more mysterious, even more ancient, and certainly more haunted than those tourist Americans could ever have imagined. The beauty of Ghost Killer, apart from Heller’s luminous prose, is that Albert’s journey is our journey—that crooked road towards understanding and accepting that the ghosts of our past don’t have to be the ghosts of our present and our future if only we remain open to the mysteries and wonders of life.”

—Glen S. Downey, AWP-awarding winning poet and State of Iowa Public Defender