Colleen Coble's Distant Echoes

You can count on Colleen Coble’s stories to feature an fascinating animal. The animal at the center of Distant Echoes is a Pacific bottle-nosed dolphin named Nani who is being trained by the story’s heroine, Kaia. I’ve always loved dolphins and would really enjoy swimming with them, so I read this book with great interest.

Kaia Oana lives on the island of Kauai and meets Lieutenant Commander Jesse Matthews of the Barking Sands Naval Base while trying to rescue as many people as she can from a tourist boat that was hit by one of the Navy’s missiles.

Since the missile defense system tests had been promising so far, this missile misdirection could be a sabotage. After Jesse orders his men to pull survivors from the wrecked remains of the tourist boat, he watches a young Hawaiian girl, Kaia, holding onto the dorsal fin of a dolphin as she carries a victim in her other arm. She immediately captures his attention because he’d never seen anything like what he’d just witnessed. Jesse pulls Kaia on board his boat with the help of her brother Bane. Even though she's exhausted, she still has enough energy to lean over the edge of Jesse’s boat to reassure her dolphin that she’s okay.

Kaia studies mammal intelligence at Seaworthy Labs and is teaching a dolphin, Nani, to communicate with humans. Jesse hires Kaia and Nani to patrol the coast with a camera strapped to Nani so they have a better chance at catching whoever wants to sabotage the missile tests.

The closer Kaia and Jesse get to finding the one responsible for the tourist deaths, the deeper into trouble they get. They’re worried not only for themselves, but also for Jesse’s young neice.

Kaia’s brothers, Bane and Mano, enjoy minor roles in this story, but get to be the heroes in other books in Coble’s Aloha Reef series.

Colleen Coble has won many awards with Distant Echoes, the first book in the Aloha Reef series: 2006 ACFW Overall Book of the Year, 2006 ACFW Suspense Book of the Year, and the 2006 National Readers’ Choice Award – Inspirational. She won third place in the 2006 Daphne du Maurier Award of Excellence for Long Inspirational Mystery/Suspense. And she’s finaled in other contests with this enormously entertaining book.