Sun on the water, wind in the palms, the scent of salt and frangipani in the air-this is the Caribbean most people dream of. To the outside world, these islands are a paradise: a playground for the rich, a sanctuary for the sun-seeker, a place where troubles are left behind as easily as footprints in the sand. But every paradise has its price. Beneath the dazzling light, shadows gather-shadows cast not just by palm trees, but by greed, ambition, fear, and the ghosts of justice left undone.
This book is an exploration of those shadows. With the sea as a silent witness, we plunge into three of the Caribbean's most compelling unsolved crimes. Each is a story of beauty and betrayal, of power and vulnerability, of lives upended by acts that still echo through history. The cases selected for this volume are more than just mysteries; they are windows into the soul of the Caribbean-a place where isolation breeds secrets, and where the line between sanctuary and prison can blur in a heartbeat.
We begin with the murder of Sir Harry Oakes in the Bahamas in 1943, a case that reads like noir fiction-except every word is true. Here was a man who had it all: fortune, influence, and a private empire carved from the colonial tropics. Yet on a stormy night, his life ended in violence as shocking as it was mysterious. The investigation would draw in the Duke of Windsor, a former king turned colonial governor, and expose a tangled web of money, politics, and whispered conspiracies. To this day, the true killer of Sir Harry Oakes walks unseen, their identity lost in the glare of scandal and the haze of time.
Next, we sail to the Grenadines in the 1970s, where a sleek yacht vanished without a trace. The Caribbean is a sea of stories, but few are as haunting as the disappearance of this vessel and her crew. Was it a crime of opportunity on the open ocean, a planned escape gone wrong, or something stranger still? The clues are as elusive as the currents, and the answers are locked beneath the waves-or perhaps in the minds of those who chose silence over truth.
Finally, we travel to Guyana, 1980. Here, revolution simmered in the tropical heat, and the air was thick with both hope and dread. Walter Rodney was more than a historian; he was the voice of a movement, a man who dared to challenge the status quo. His assassination was a thunderclap that reverberated across the Caribbean and beyond. Was he silenced by those in power, betrayed by comrades, or caught in the crossfire of larger forces? Decades later, the official story still fails to satisfy, and the wound remains open in the nation's memory.
