John Deal's life is finally coming together--he is reunited with his lovely wife, they have a beautiful baby, and DealCo, his Miami construction business, is booming with post-Hurricane Andrew contracts rolling in. The future looks bright...until the night that his house is engulfed by an arsonist's flames and his wife is terribly burned.

Unbeknownst to him, Deal has stumbled into the path of the sickly sweet plans of sugar cane magnate and Cuban imigri power broker, Vicente Luis Torreno, a man obsessed by his dreams of a repatriated Cuba and the juicy profits of the sugar monopoly he is sure will come with it.
Torreno's sugar-coated influence reaches to the highest levels of the U.S. Government, a fact that more than complicates Deal's efforts to find out who is responsible for this latest tragedy and to avoid joining the string of bodies that litter the South Florida landscape, all the way from the vast cane fields of Lake Okeechobee to the shores of Biscayne Bay.