Cold As Ice

The owners, friends, and employees, old and new, of the Diamond of the
Caribbean resort are celebrating Christmas and the New Year with parties and a
special event to take place on New Year’s Day. The privately owned island resort is
perfectly situated for a spectacular view of an annular eclipse to take place that
day. Stephanie Johnson, head of marketing for the resort, came up with the idea to
invite scientific experts on eclipses to come set up their specialty solar telescopes
on the highest part of the island for guests who paid extra to attend the event.

Christmas Day, Ike Mac Kenzie, head of security at the resort, receives an
anonymous call from someone on Santa Bela, a nearby small island nation, stating
a prisoner who attacked one of the resort’s employees the previous summer had
escaped. Julie Shaw, a young woman recently promoted as one of the daytime co-mangers of the front desk in the main lobby is the victim of a brutal assault by the
escaped prisoner. The other new co-manager of the front desk, Rafael Gonzalez,
realizes after Julie’s attack that he’s falling in love with her but is too afraid to
admit it. What he doesn’t know is that Julie has been in love with him for years…

The resort is on high alert to watch for the escaped prisoner in case he tries to come
after Julie again. Owners of the resort, Ike and Mac MacKenzie, attempt to verify
the prisoner escape but no one in authority will talk to them except a young police
officer, Jesus Ortiz. After a chance sighting of a vehicle coming from an area of the
island no one ever visits, Ortiz shares his suspicions with Ike and Mac, and on the
morning of New Year’s Day, Mac and Hank Thomas, a security guard at the resort,
make a gruesome discovery in the low mountains of Santa Bela. That same day,
Julie Shaw’s life is in danger but not from whom everyone expected…

The Santa Bela authorities are embroiled in a huge coverup, so Ike takes Jesus’s
suggestion to enlist the aid of some investigative journalists, and the one who
jumps on it first turns out to be an old friend of Mac, Hank, and Al Johnson from
their years in the military. She and her son are the only ones who can get to the
truth about the coverup, and Ike and her unborn child nearly die because Ike knew
the truth but couldn’t prove it…