In the Time Before Light — Ian Macmillan

In the sweltering summer of 1824, British merchant Matthew Davis finds himself drunk and delirious in the port of Honolulu, thinking he might like to hear about “the military exploits of the natives, their feather-bedecked kings and ferocious armies.” Instead, he stumbles into a confrontation with disease and misery and bears witness to the harrowing life story of Ka‘alokulokupono, an elderly Hawaiian kidnapped in his youth by the legendary privateer Roger Beckwith, a man dead-set on pursuing the design of a world consumed by one evil act after another. From master storyteller Ian MacMillan comes his most sweeping epic yet, a tale of three men and a perilous voyage traversing Hawai‘i and the Pacific Rim.