In The Shadows of Paradise
South Florida's most beautiful neighborhoods can hide secrets for generations, and few places look more peaceful than the old waterfront homes of El Cid. That illusion is shattered when a terrified late-night call sends Palm Beach County Sheriff's Deputies Samuel “Sam” Rourke and Jake Masters to the home of Evelyn Carlisle, where they find the elderly woman dead upstairs and a trail of wet footprints ending impossibly at a solid wall.
What begins as an unexplained death quickly reaches far beyond one house and one night. Hidden photographs show men and women seated in the same plain wooden chair across decades, while old records reveal that some later vanished and others went on living successful public lives, all beneath the shadow of a small black circle whose history reaches back to South Florida's pineapple era.
As Sam and Jake dig deeper, the Carlisle property begins giving up secrets that were never meant to be found, including concealed rooms, forgotten passages, waterfront records, and evidence of a quiet web of families, attorneys, businesses, and favors that survived precisely because it never needed a formal name. The deeper the investigation reaches into Palm Beach's respectable past, the harder it becomes to determine who was threatened, who was protected, and who willingly accepted the price of belonging.
Evelyn spent years preserving the names, photographs, and documents that others wanted forgotten, but even she did not leave the truth in one place. The final trail she created forces Sam to question the meaning of the missing, the purpose of the black circles, and whether the people who appear to be victims, witnesses, and trusted allies are really what they seem.
In The Shadows Of Paradise is the second book in Howard Mark Hines' Blood in the Palms series, a South Florida mystery filled with buried history, waterfront secrets, hidden influence, and an investigation that proves paradise can conceal its darkest truths in plain sight.
