Paradise has a body count.

Twenty years ago, NYPD detective Frank Valenti was framed, disgraced and driven two thousand miles from the only life he’d ever wanted. Now he plays five nights a week in an Aruba hotel bar, having traded badge and gun for a guitar, a barstool and twenty years of Caribbean sunsets. He’s made his peace with paradise—and a few friends worth keeping. None more than Carlos Moreno, the man who knows that Frank left more behind in New York than even Frank realizes.

Then Carlos is murdered.

The deal Carlos refused to make—over the last undeveloped stretch of beachfront on an island built to sell paradise—may be the reason why.

On an island where everything has a price, Frank and Diana are about to discover what happens when the most valuable thing is the one thing that cannot be bought.

When New York investigative reporter Diana Rose arrives chasing a story of her own, she and Frank discover they’re pulling at the same thread: secret bidders, shell companies, bought officials and a deal worth killing for. What begins as a property dispute unravels into something far larger—a corruption conspiracy stretching from a quiet Caribbean coastline back to New York City and to the betrayal, buried for twenty years, that ended Frank’s career.

The deeper they dig, the closer the case comes to secrets Carlos carried to his grave—and to the truth about what happened to Frank all those years ago. To uncover it, Frank will have to confront not only who killed his oldest friend, but who he really is and what he’s still willing to lose.

ONE DEADLY ISLAND is the first book in the Frank Valenti & Diana Rose Mysteries—an atmospheric Caribbean crime thriller about corruption, loyalty, buried history and the price of holding your ground.

Book Two, One Deadly Mile, arrives Spring 2027.