The Cost of Paradise l William Ubagan l eBook

Jane Carter is supposed to be dead.

After orchestrating her own fatal accident, she vanishes from her former life and resurfaces on a remote tropical island under a new name, convinced that distance, anonymity, and beauty can erase the past she is desperate to escape. For the first time in years, she believes she is safe. Free. Untraceable.

She is wrong.

What begins as a clean break slowly unravels as the island’s idyllic calm reveals a darker truth. Strangers know too much. Friendly faces watch too closely. The paradise she chose as a hiding place becomes a pressure cooker, tightening around her with every passing day. Jane soon realizes that disappearing has not made her invisible—it has made her vulnerable.

As paranoia mounts and trust fractures, Jane is forced to confront the reason she ran in the first place: her entanglement with a powerful man who weaponizes guilt, silence, and control to destroy lives without ever pulling a trigger. When her past finally surfaces in the most brutal way imaginable, Jane is thrust into a deadly game of leverage where innocence is currency and survival demands impossible choices.

The island becomes a battleground—sunlit beaches masking surveillance, lush jungles concealing pursuit, and familiar comforts turning into traps. Each attempt to flee only deepens the danger, forcing Jane to abandon the fantasy of escape and face a devastating truth: you cannot reinvent yourself without reckoning with who you were.

As the threat escalates, Jane must decide how far she is willing to go—not just to survive, but to stop the cycle of manipulation that nearly erased her. With lives hanging in the balance and her anonymity collapsing, she makes a final, irreversible choice: to expose the truth she once buried, even if it costs her the safety she fought to create.

Set against a breathtaking yet unforgiving backdrop, The Cost of Paradise is a taut psychological thriller about identity, power, and the illusion of escape. It explores the high price of reinvention, the danger of silence, and the moment when survival is no longer enough.

Because paradise doesn’t save you.

And the past always finds a way back.