One shot of vodka at four o’clock every afternoon. Never two.

One to remember you are alive. Two, and you start to forget why.

Ten years ago, James Bradcombe’s plane went down in the Caribbean off Jamaica’s north coast. The search was suspended. The world moved on.

Novelist Arial Whittington has three weeks to deliver a new book and not one idea worth writing. Then, snorkeling a storm-churned reef, she finds a backpack pinned beneath a slab of twisted metal that has lain on the bottom for a decade. Inside a sealed case are an encrypted drive and a string of numbers.

The numbers lead north, to a white cross on a rock in the middle of Highway 401 near Rockport, Ontario, where FBI agent Alice Parsons died in 2016. Her death was ruled an accident. It wasn’t.

The drive holds a novel: a spy’s account of twenty years inside the cartels, written as fiction, and true.

The people who buried it are still out there. Someone is already following her. And the trail runs closer to home than she ever imagined.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Arial is going to publish this one.

A spy thriller that runs from Jamaica’s north coast and Seven Mile Beach in Negril to the Thousand Islands, Ottawa and New York.