French judge Anne Marie Laveaud has to rethink her murder investigation techniques when she is assigned to the tiny French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. and#160; On a plantation in the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, a man's body is found in a pond, riddled with bullets. The victim is Monsieur Calais, a wealthy land-owner. Within twenty-four hours, a suspect is arrested. He had been making death threats against Calais, claiming that land had been stolen from him, and the gun used to shoot Calais was found buried on his property. This, coupled with the fact that the man had just returned from a forty-year exile in French Guyana for murdering his wife, is enough to convince the gendarmes of his guilt. and#160; Anne Marie Laveaud, a French-born judge who has recently been transferred to Guadeloupe, is called in to make a ruling. With a keen sense of compassion for the accused, she must navigate the world of Caribbean justiceandmdash;very different from what she was used to in Franceandmdash;to confirm her suspicion that all is not as it seems.