450 years ago a treasure  ship went down. In Miami, the heat hasn't let up  yet...Hap Tyler tailboards on Biscayne bay, hears  voices, seduces young women, and lives on the edge  of history in his family's old-money mansion amid  Miami's pastel glitz. But while Hap stumbles around  in the shadow of his more successful older  brother, Daniel, a tangled web of deception and greed is  being spun around him --a web that leads Daniel to  his death.

Trying to solve his brother's murder, Hap  collides with a 450-year-old secret: the disappearance  of $400 million in a sunken Spanish plunder.  Daniel's upscale girlfriend is close to digging up the  treasure, an avaricious senator has already tasted  it, and a stone-cold killer will stop at nothing  to bring it home. For Hap a dark and bloody vein of  Florida and family history has been opened. And  the only way to close it is through a modern ritual  of violence and truth.