Distant Echoes and Black Sands by Colleen Coble ~ Book Reviews

Kaia Oana is a mammal intelligence researcher based in Hawaii.  Her dolphins are her life.  Her relationship with her rescued and trained dolphin, Nani takes the majority of her days and she is close to a break thru in the area of communications with dolphins.  But someone new has taken over the research facility and wants to turn it into a dolphin tourist attraction and Kaia is running out of time to prove her research.  When a tourist catamaran explodes off the coast close to an army weapons testing site, Kaia and Nani aid in the search and rescue efforts.  Exhausted from not giving up to find survivors, Kaia is pulled from the water by Lieutenant Jesse Matthews.  Lieutenant Matthews feels that missile research might have had something to do with the explosion but his thoughts fall on deaf ears with his superior.  Recruiting Kaia and Nani, Lt. Matthews starts his own rogue investigation to get to the truth placing them all in danger.

This is one of the author's older series, the Aloha Reef Series, that I've had sitting around forever and finally made it a goal to read all four.  I read this book in the summer, so am very late getting to the review.  Life happened!  But from my memory I did really enjoy this story.  It is consistent with this author's works:  a little mystery, a lot of suspense, a little romance and was a great summer read.  I enjoyed the author's efforts into dolphin communications research and it was an interesting part of the story.  There is a bit of setting up characters as there are lots in this one, but the suspense was good.  This story also gets into some family drama which is an element I do like in stories.

I gave this one a 9/10

Annie Tagama is volcanologist who works alongside her father at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.  But life has thrown some curves her way and she is losing her passion for the work, even as a long dormant volcano on the island is coming to life.  She has been grieving the loss of her brother in the Middle  East under mysterious circumstances when she discovers that he might be alive after all and is trying to communicate but to find him she must join forces with the very person she blamed for her brother's death in the first place.  As they try to find answers an ancient cult on the island starts gaining traction once more, including it's practice of human sacrifice and it becomes enmeshed with their investigation.

I didn't not enjoy this second installment in the series nearly as much as I did the first one.  Though the volcano science part was very interesting, I found some of the other stuff in the story leaning towards unbelievable.  I did like that as in other series by the author, she continues the story with a whole different set of main characters but a lot of favorite characters from the previous story return and are connected.  The series are not just about one main character.  And her descriptions of Hawaii are beautiful.  There are 2 more in this Aloha Reef Series that I am looking forward to getting to.  

I gave this one a 7.5/10