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| Wiley's Refrain |  | Author: Lono Waiwaiole
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $4.79
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Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,024,804
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0312349092
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780312349097
ASIN: 0312349092
Publication Date: November 29, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Wiley is a professional poker player in Portland who walks the seedy streets of the city+s darker side. He+s no stranger to violence, but he+s got a good heart and a noble streak that his friends and family know is a mile long. When he teams up with his best friend Leon, their enemies often see a streak of a different sort. The two are both beloved and feared among those who know them. The murder of a young musician puts Wiley in a vengeful frame of mind and when the evidence trail points to Hawaii, a place where Wiley has never set foot but which seems lately to be calling him home, he heads for the land of his ancestors in pursuit of justice. Reminiscent of the classic noir masters, Lono Waiwaiole+s Wiley series has garnered a cult following and a palpable buzz in the mystery world.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Can't Put it Down - Pithy, Funny & Exciting March 29, 2006
Alan Peterman (Portland, Oregon)
This is by far the best of the Wiley series. The author has hit his stride in this book, having a fine story, involving characters, and wonderful use of understated dialogue. Much like the Robert Parker "Spenser" books - but much more edgy and up to date.
The story is one of greed, anger, sadness and longing. All wrapped around the blues scene and the Portland and Hawaii locales. Anyone who has been into music or Hawaii will love the imagery, even though it does show more of the underground marginally criminal sides of those worlds.
Anyway, I highly recommend it for those who like Westlake, Vachss, Goren, Block and other such authors.
exciting Wiley thriller November 30, 2005
Harriet Klausner
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In Portland, Oregon, poker professional Wiley learns from Danny Alexander that he got promising young jazz musician Ronnie a part-time gig. Afterward Wiley laments to his pal, Leon (friends since their days of being abused in elementary school by their teacher Mrs. Boomer) that he prays that Danny has his head on straight or the talented Ronnie might suffer. The gambler will soon realize how accurate his comment proves to be when someone murders Ronnie.
Wiley takes the homicide personally as he and his family knew the victim. With the help of Leon, they begin walking the mean streets of Portland, but the clues take a spin to Hawaii. Wiley who has never set foot on the home of his family tree heads to the Aloha State where he expects to pound the crap out of Danny, who he blames and the proof seems to affirm his involvement. However, Wiley finds that one red herring after another takes him down a different path.
The third Wiley escapade is an exciting thriller that takes the hero/antihero (depending on whether you are on the receiving end of either his or Leon's fists) on an intriguing noir adventure. The flashbacks and side comments to his past enable the audience to see much more of Wiley's moral system that demands justice vigilante style immediately. Though the motive behind the need for vengeance that drives Wiley and Leon to seek the killer never seems fully developed fans will appreciate his latest adventure.
Harriet Klausner
quite good May 1, 2006
missouri reader (fulton MO)
Very enjoyable crime novel. Waiwaiole's writing style can seem a little forced at times, but overall is engaging. I liked the Hawaiian touches.
This thriller hits close to home... June 3, 2006
Kevin Rienecker (Portland, OR USA)
First, some background before the review:
Way back in the early-to-mid 1990's, a sleazy Portland nightclub owner and concert promoter was allegedly printing hundreds of extra counterfeited concert tickets, then selling them at the door before gigs and pocketing the extra cash. Late one night after a John Lee Hooker blues show, a young man who had just moved to town and taken a job at one of the nightclubs confronted the promoter about the scam. No one ever saw him again. The club owner claimed he was innocent of any wrong doing.
A reporter for a weekly alternative newspaper got whiff of the story, and doggedly investigated the disappearance, interviewing hundreds of people and publishing literally dozens of articles over the course of the next few years; and with the aid of the missing boy's frantic parents, aided the authorities with solving - more or less - a seedy murder and the subsequent cover-up by the killer.
The club owner, meanwhile, was having other problems, besides dealing with the investigation into the disappearance of his employee: he was in serious trouble with the IRS, and he eventually bolted the country, only to be arrested while promoting a concert in Vietnam. The Oregonian and the television news media began to tell portions of the story as well, now that it was national news. The club owner was later convicted of tax evasion, but the murder was ever proven - I don't think that the missing employee's body was never found.
That's the gist of the story anyway, near as I can remember. The entire thing was like a plotline taken right out of a pulp-noir type thriller. Okay, enough with the background. Now, on to the review...
For Wiley's Lament, the third installment in his neo-noir thriller series featuring a troubled, card-playing vigilante named Wiley and his childhood friend and former pimp, Leon, Portland author and former high school English teacher Lono Waiwaiole steals this set up almost word-for-word, changing a few details here and there along the way to suit his own story, which is told in retrospect, after Wiley heads to Hawaii chasing a killer.
Here, the concert promoter/killer is a sex-and-gambling addict/sleazebag named Danny (also referred to as Dannyboy), and the murder victim is Ray, a sometime employee of Danny's, and the talented young bass-player for an up-and-coming Portland-based blues group managed by Leon.
Ray's band gets a plum gig opening for B.B. King; then, the night before the yearly Portland Blues Festival, Danny bludgeons Ray to death with a microphone stand after failing to smooth talk Ray out of his suspicion that Danny sold hundreds of extra tickets to the show and stole a large portion of the receipts. Danny covers up the killing with the aid of his even sleazier right-hand-man and his gay chauffer.
The next day, Ray fails to show for the band's scheduled gig at the blues festival. This being totally out of character for Ray, Leon and Wiley get a bad vibe and worriedly confront Danny, who was the last person to see Ray alive. Danny gives them a lame, phony story about Ray leaving town due to a family emergency, then compounds the lie by setting up a violent `diversion' - the rape of Wiley's estranged ex-wife Julie (and the mother of his dead daughter) - by a couple of hired thugs brought in from Washington State. Wiley and Leon immediately sense something fishy after speaking with the paranoid Danny, and then the book is off and running.
As with his previous two novels, Waiwaiole splits the resulting narrative along parallel chapters, using the device to alternate between Wiley and Leon's search for the truth of Ray's disappearance and Wiley's eventual hunt for his killer, and Danny's deepening paranoia over the theft, the murder, and his pursuit.
Waiwaiole's writing is still somewhat uneven - the clipped noir banter that marked the first two novels comes and goes here, and often sounds forced, distracting the reader from the story and the more interesting bits of Wiley's introspection; scenes and chapters are set up and then mysteriously abandoned - as when Ray's parents fly into town to help locate their missing son. Waiwaiole pads the pages informing us of his intimate, map-like knowledge of Portland and the surrounding environs, sounding like a dashboard GPS system while Wiley and Leon drive around, aimlessly hunting for clues. Frustratingly, instead of letting events unfold naturally, Waiwaiole has a tendency to get sloppy and use contrived situations to resolve Wiley's investigation. Wiley doesn't seem do much, really; he usually seems to end up being in the right (or wrong) place at the right time.
The duo of Wiley and Leon are planted firmly in a grittier, Spenser and Hawk type mold; and on the plus side, in Wiley, Waiwaiole has created something original: a unique and complex character with a fertile and wholly developed background. This only being his third book, Waiwaiole seems to be finding his own voice as a writer, slowly but surely rounding into a talented author with a gift for finding interesting stories to tell. All my quibbles aside, this is a much more satisfying and fully realized novel than either of his previous books, and - despite my gripes - is well worth a look.
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