PART TWO: RED WATER
THE COUNTDOWN WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING. THE TRAP WAS ALWAYS CLOSING.
Mara Chen thought she understood the conspiracy buried inside Hawaii's infrastructure. She was wrong.
A signal from Maui changes everything.
A twelve-year-old girl is being held in the storm-darkened mountains of upcountry Maui - not as a hostage, but as a system credential. Her captors have built a backdoor into every node of the islands' AI power grid, and they've taught the system to recognize her as an authorization key. When the grid rolls over, it rolls over to them.
Mara and HPD Lieutenant Nakamura - injured, running on fumes, and cut off from every official channel that hasn't already been compromised - have one thread left to pull. One pulse from a tracker bracelet. One window that's closing by the minute.
Enemies are moving through the very systems meant to protect the islands. Every transmission is a risk. Every road leads somewhere that doesn't appear on any map. And someone is waiting for them to make the wrong move.
When the water turns red, Mara may discover that the most dangerous part of the system is not what it controls - but what it knows about her.
Dead in Paradise: Red Water is Book 2 of 3 in the Dead in Paradise series.
For fans of Daniel Silva, Tom Clancy, and Black Mirror.