The author of American Holocaust reveals how Hawaii was transformed by the 1931 trial of a socialite mother who arranged for the kidnapping and murder of a nonwhite islander accused of raping her daughter. In the fall of 1931 Thalia Massie the bored aristocratic wife of a young naval officer stationed in Honolulu accused six nonwhite islanders of gang rape. The ensuing trial let loose a storm of racial and sexual hysteria but the case against the suspects was scant and the trial ended in a hung jury. Outraged Thalia s socialite mother arranged the kidnapping and murder of one of the suspects. In the spectacularly publicized trial that followed Clarence Darrow came to Hawai?i to defend Thalia s mother a sorry epitaph to a noble career. It is one of the most sensational criminal cases in American History Stannard has rendered more than a lurid tale. One hundred and fifty years of oppression came to a head in those sweltering courtrooms. In the face of overwhelming intimidation from a cabal of corrupt military leaders and businessmen various people involved with the case--the judge the defense team the jurors a newspaper editor and the accused themselves-refused to be cowed. Their moral courage united the disparate elements of the non-white community and galvanized Hawai?i s rapid transformation from an oppressive white-run oligarchy to the harmonic multicultural American state it became. Honor Killing is a great true crime story worthy of Dominick Dunne-both a sensational read and an important work of social history.