Debra Bokur Books in Order

Debra Bokur grew up in a suburb outside Providence, Rhode Island, and writing seems to have been her natural way of making sense of the world. She has said poetry was her first outlet, going back to grade school, and that putting feelings on the page came easier than saying them out loud.

Then life took her in a lot of directions before fiction caught up. Bokur studied drama at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida, later studied film and television writing at the University of Colorado Boulder, worked as a newspaper editor in Florida, and went on to a long career in magazine journalism and editing. She has also written plays, short films, essays, and poetry, and for a time she trained horses professionally in North Florida.

She has really been a working writer in the broadest sense.

Over the years her byline has appeared on more than 2,000 print pieces, covering travel, culture, food, wellness, the environment, and lifestyle. She spent more than a decade as poetry editor for Many Mountains Moving, and her journalism won Lowell Thomas Awards along with other honors. One especially unusual credit still makes people smile: she wrote original literary essays that appeared on the boxes of ten tea flavors for Celestial Seasonings.

The turn toward crime fiction came through travel. While working as an editor and journalist, Bokur was repeatedly sent to Hawaii to report on healing traditions and wellness practices. She spent years returning to the islands, learning oral traditions, attending ceremonies, and seeing both the beauty visitors know and the harder realities they often miss. Out of that came the idea for a detective who could move between modern police work and older cultural knowledge.

That idea became Kali Māhoe and the Dark Paradise books. The Fire Thief, published in 2020, opens with a dead teenage surfer on Maui and immediately shows what Bokur does well: strong atmosphere, a real feel for place, and a mystery that never loses its procedural backbone. The Bone Field and The Lava Witch deepen that approach, mixing cold cases, ritual clues, island history, and the emotional weight Kali carries from book to book.

What readers tend to like most is the balance. These novels are moody but readable, steeped in Hawaiian landscape and legend, yet still built around clear investigations and human motives. Bokur is drawn to the line between logic and belief, to the way grief lingers, and to how paradise can hold poverty, addiction, violence, and old memory right alongside beauty.

She also keeps plenty of other creative lanes open.

Bokur works as a voice actor and audiobook narrator, and her background in theater still shows up in the way she shapes scene and dialogue. She was mentored for years by novelist Jack D. Hunter, and she seems comfortable moving between journalism, poetry, screen work, and fiction without making a fuss about it.

These days she divides her time between the mountains of Colorado and coastal Maine with her husband, James Rawsthorne. She hikes, photographs wildlife, draws, gardens, bakes, practices yoga and meditation, and shares workspace with two opinionated cats. She and her husband are also renovating a Victorian inn in Maine, which sounds exactly like the sort of place a mystery writer might end up with on purpose.