In both his creative and critical writing, he is concerned with contemporary multi-ethnic Hawaii society, particularly social relations between its residents of Native Hawaiian, Japanese, Caucasian, and Puerto Rican descent; the 1970s "Hawaiian Renaissance" movement and the disappearance of its legendary cultural icon George Helm of Protect Kaho'olawe Ohana (PKO); and the postmodern juxtaposition of popular artistic forms (the detective novel, cinema, crime fiction, rock music) with high literature.
[1] Shaped by genre fiction of the postwar period, his regional stories influenced that of Generation X/millennial authors such as Chris McKinney and Alexei Melnick,[2] "urban Honolulu" novelists known for their gritty, realistic approaches to depicting crime, drugs, and lower-class life in the islands.
[3] Morales, along with fellow writer-editors Richard Hamasaki[4] and Dennis Kawaharada,[5] were key figures in the "local literature" movement who actively promoted Native Hawaiian writing and storytelling in the late twentieth-century, publishing community.
Literary scholar Susan Najita found similarities in the book's thematic content with the writer's collection of short stories (The Speed of Darkness, 1988), calling the millennial novel "an extension of this earlier work in both its fictionalization of the events following Helm's disappearance and in Morales's deft interweaving of history, colonial resistance movements, popular culture, and native Hawaiian tradition.
[8] Morales' protagonist, the hard-boiled detective David "Kawika" Apana, is consulted by a Native Hawaiian, female activist and filmmaker, whose case sends him from urban Honolulu to the semi-rural windward and north coasts of O`ahu island, into the shadier, complex layers of Hawaii society about which few know and fewer even dare speak.