South Pacific Affair — Ed Lacy

South Pacific Affair, first published in 1960, is a novel set in Tahiti and centers on a romance between a simple island girl and an American man. While trying to create a new life together, the past keeps returning to haunt the pair and their idyllic life on their island paradise. Author Ed Lacy (a pseudonym for Leonard Zinberg, 1911-1968) was a prolific writer of pulp crime fiction, and is credited with creating the first believable African-American private eye in American fiction, Toussaint Marcus Moore (in Room to Swing, 1957).

They had a South Sea honeymoon, the simple Island girl and the strange American. It was the life Ray had remembered, longed for and finally came back to. But slowly, the past broke into their paradise. First came Dubon, with his scheme for a tourist love-nest. Then irresistible Heru, whose copper skin and taste for money spelled trouble