Morales wrote his first novel, When the Shark Bites (2002), over a six-year period. He drew from actual events in Hawaii social and political history—such as the suspicious vanishing of Helm and fellow Native Hawaiian activist Kimo Mitchell in the late 1970s, and the Hawaiian sovereignty movement which exploded by the 1990s—blending known, local figures into fictionalized characters within a multiple-perspective, mystery/crime genre story. Literary scholar Susan Najita found similarities in the book's thematic content with the writer's collection of short stories (The Speed of Darkness, 1988), calling the millennial novel "an extension of this earlier work in both its fictionalization of the events following Helm's disappearance and in Morales's deft interweaving of history, colonial resistance movements, popular culture, and native Hawaiian tradition." When the Shark Bites is a modern-day detective story in which an indigenous Hawaiian doctoral student, Alika, investigates the mysterious disappearance of native Hawaiian activist Keoni in the late 1970s. Morales has said of the technique of combining regional history with mainstream genre fiction, "A novel is a way to bring in all the different worlds I know."
