Paradise Has a Dark Side

Blood in the Palms

A Palm Beach County Crime Series

Deputies Sam Rourke and Jake Masters work the cases hiding under Palm Beach County's sunshine, from waterfront mansions and gated villages out to the sawgrass and the citrus groves west of Loxahatchee.

Across five books the trail runs from the old waterfront homes of El Cid and a gated retirement village to the canals of the Everglades and the fading groves of the western county. Each case shows how much can hide in a place that looks like paradise.

5 BooksComplete SeriesPalm Beach County

Start with Book One See the Reading Order

The Books in Order

Every book stands on its own, but reading them in order lets the larger story unfold.

IBOOK ONE

The Hidden World of South Florida

South Florida may look like paradise, but beneath the sunshine, palm trees, waterfront homes, and crowded city streets lies a world most people never see. Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Deputy Samuel “Sam” Rourke is pulled into that hidden world when what appears to be an isolated act of violence begins pointing toward something much larger. His investigation soon stretches beyond Palm Beach County and into a dangerous network involving secret shipments, organized crime, unexplained contamination, and the powerful Duarte Empire.

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IIBOOK TWO

In The Shadows of Paradise

South Florida's most beautiful neighborhoods can hide secrets for generations, and few places look more peaceful than the old waterfront homes of El Cid. That illusion is shattered when a terrified late-night call sends Palm Beach County Sheriff's Deputies Samuel “Sam” Rourke and Jake Masters to the home of Evelyn Carlisle, where they find the elderly woman dead upstairs and a trail of wet footprints ending impossibly at a solid wall.

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IIIBOOK THREE

Whispers Beyond The Gate

Sabal Palms Village promises its residents a peaceful retirement behind a guarded gate. That peace collapses the morning longtime resident Estelle Marsh is found dead in her apartment, in a unit with a lock that was never broken. Her neighbors call it a quiet passing. Retired NYPD detective Vivian Katz calls it something else, because for months she has been hearing a voice through the wall behind her own closet, and she is no longer sure anyone is listening but her.

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IVBOOK FOUR

Silence Beneath the Sawgrass

Monroe County's stretch of the Everglades has always been good at keeping secrets, and Deputy Boyd Williams learns exactly how good the night he watches, alone and off duty, a small plane bank low over the sawgrass and drop a man's body into a canal that was never meant to give up what it swallows. When he reports what he saw to Sheriff Roy Merrick and is told, quietly, to let it go, Boyd begins to understand that some things in his own department were settled long before he ever pinned on a badge.

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VBOOK FIVE

When the Orchards Wept

Florida's citrus country has been dying by inches for twenty years, and nowhere does that slow, aching loss feel more haunted than the groves west of Loxahatchee, where the Whitfield family has worked the same rows for three generations. When migrant worker Jimmy Jones vanishes from the Whitfield grove the same night he witnesses something being buried beneath the trees, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Deputies Samuel “Sam” Rourke and Jake Masters are pulled back to a cartel they thought they had already broken, one that never actually let go.

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Blood in the Palms

The Books in Order

The Hidden World of South Florida

In The Shadows of Paradise

Whispers Beyond The Gate

Silence Beneath the Sawgrass

When the Orchards Wept

More Series by Howard Mark Hines