Kerri Hakoda's "Too Deep to Cross"

Kerri Hakoda has worked in and out of Alaska in advertising and marketing, marine transportation, cable television and trade magazine ad sales. She was born and raised in Hawaii, but now calls northwest Washington her home, where she lives with her husband (himself a veteran of the Alaska fishing industry) and writes mystery, historical, and young adult science fiction.

Here Hakoda dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Too Deep to Cross: A Thriller:

Too Deep to Cross would be challenging to cast as a movie. In it, multi-racial Anchorage Homicide Detective DeHavilland Beans returns to his Yukon River hometown after a battered prosthetic leg from a local man washes up – and turns a long-cold missing person case into a homicide investigation. In the San Francisco Bay Area cleaning out the family home, Beans’ mother Mari makes unsettling discoveries of her own.

I envision a very specific look, a distinctive combination of ethnicities for DeHavilland Beans – he is half Japanese, a quarter Irish and a quarter Native Alaskan – a difficult casting combination. Maybe a younger Daniel Henney type, or Lewis Tan? It’s hard to find reasonably pleasant-looking Eurasian actors who aren’t martial artists, not that that’s a bad thing – I just don’t see Beans as being a blackbelt in anything. I like Henry Golding as well, but he may be too handsome and urbane.

For Beans’ mother Mari, who is Japanese American – I see Tamlyn Tomita, Joan Chen, or similarly attractive older Asian American woman.

Oddly enough, the antagonists are easier to cast, I think. I clearly see Vincent D’Onofrio as Victor Paul, the town’s overbearing shopkeeper, and Barry Koeghan as his over-indulged son Lloyd (and owner of the prosthetic leg).

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The Page 69 Test: Too Deep to Cross.

--Marshal Zeringue