Trinidad, West Indies: Frank Shannon, who works for Skidmore Oil, is enjoying himself before he has to set up the grill for his annual Boxing Day Barbecue for wealthy Trinidadians and Cruising American Yachtsmen at the Five Islands, a small Island group about a mile off the eastern coast of Trinidad in the Gulf of Paria. He’s swimming, snorkeling, having a good time. Ashore his wife Beth is lazing the day away watching her husband frolic. Then Frank’s daughter, Noelle by his first marriage, screams out that she’s found a dead body. Beth and Frank hurry to investigate, when Frank sees the dead woman he collapses with a heart attack. Los Angeles, California: The two woman are met by a pair of police officers at the airport when they bring the body back for burial. The news is bad, Frank’s ex-wife, Noelle’s mother, along with Noelle’s aunt and her husband Mark Skidmore, who also happened to be Frank’s boss, have all been murdered.
Homicide Detective Billy Wolf offers the woman the use of his beachside apartment in Long Beach, telling them it’s a friend’s place. He has been on extended leave for a year because of the death of his wife and child and this is his first case back on the job, so he wants to keep the women under his thumb. Besides, he thinks Frank Shannon dying of a heart attack three thousand miles away at the same time as his boss and ex-wife are being murdered in California isn’t just a coincidence.
Wolfe questions Beth Shannon over lunch and finds out she owns a condo in Huntington Beach that Frank used when he was in the States on business for Skidmore Oil. Wolfe and his partner go there and interrupt someone searching the place. A security guard is killed, Wolfe’s partner is shot and Wolfe is smacked on the head with the barrel of a gun. He wakes in the hospital only to find that Beth has flown the coup. She’s gone back to Trinidad without so much as a "how do you do." But Wolfe is a tenacious cop with resources of his own, so using his own money, he buys a ticket and follows.
Trinidad, West Indies: Beth apologizes for leaving California so suddenly, but she has nothing to contribute to his investigation and her home is on board her boat ‘Shogun’. Wolfe understands and on a dark and rainy New Year’s Eve they shed their inhibitions and make love in a swimming pool.
But Beth flees Trinidad in her sailboat with her daughter the next day and Wolfe wonders why. He finds out that Corbeau Yacht Services was about to seize Beth's sailboat, claiming Frank had owed them money. Wolfe also learns the shipyard has sent a couple unsavory characters after her in their own boat to find and bring her back. Against his better judgment, Wolfe teams with a drug smuggler who agrees to aid him in his quest to save the damsels in distress.
Thus begins a hunt by sailboat that covers the length and breath of the Caribbean, during which Wolfe discovers that both Corbeau (Caribbean slang for vulture) Yacht Services and Skidmore Oil are run by the Russian Mafia and are fronts for smuggling conflict diamonds into the United States. Conflict diamonds are mined by children in West African Nations who are little more than slaves of brutal dictators, who trade the diamonds for money and drugs, the money for themselves, the drugs for their child armies to keep them in power.
Frank Skidmore had been skimming diamonds for years, hiding them on ‘Shogun.’ Beth and Noelle don’t know this, the Russian Mafia does. They want their diamonds back and they don’t care who they have to kill to get them.
