Paul Hosch’s latest illustrated e-book, The Fingernail King, goes beyond the timeless beauty of Waikiki Beach to take a close look at the clever con artists and predatory scammers who feed on the island’s vulnerable tourist industry, day after day, year after year…

After several years working as an unpaid volunteer in a yoga organization, a penniless thirty-year-old is offered a part-time job in a halfway house and two months' rent free in Honolulu. He gratefully accepts the offer and lands in Hawaii with a tattered suitcase, an old guitar, and barely enough money to stay alive. The year is 1976.

Longing for a career as an artist, he answers a help-wanted ad in the local newspaper and is hired to decorate inexpensive shell jewelry for a few hours each week in a famous Waikiki Beach shopping center. This leads to a more lucrative gig painting Hawaiian scenes on fingernails which quickly goes viral. Within a few months, he becomes an established tourist attraction.

For the next twenty years, the young man works six nights a week in one of the busiest tourist resorts in the world; and as a perk, he stumbles into many strange and exotic romantic entanglements. While struggling to balance his meditation and yoga practice with the overwhelming allure of Waikiki, he finds it impossible to resist the worldly pleasures vying for his attention.

The Fingernail King is the humorous and sometimes poignant story of youthful indulgence, occasional overindulgence, and eventual redemption. 

A must-read before YOUR next tropical vacation.

You will never see paradise the same way again!