A year after the night that changed Paradise Island, the causeway looks exactly the same — the same guard hut, the same high-definition cameras, the same half-second wait while the infrared scanner reads a resident's thumb. Look closer and paradise has new neighbors: a crypto founder headed for an IPO, the queen of Italian luxury shoes and the 164-foot yacht at her private dock, a motivational speaker circling the island's last empty lot, and a former resident who left for a federal prison and came back worth twenty billion dollars.
The old secrets have not gone anywhere. They have only gone quiet — locked in lawyers' safes, buried in security-company archives, waiting in the memory of the wrong person. Hurricane season is over, Art Basel is coming, and the island is about to discover what its own law is worth.
Book II of the Paradise Island novels, by Nelson Hamel and Charles Sibley.