Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active must figure out what connects a death on a remote Arctic lake with a year-old fatal plane crash in the Brooks Range and an arson at the Chukchi Recreation Center that killed eight people, including the town's basketball star. The case turns out to involve a lucrative polar bear poaching operation and the intense bond between a brother and sister from the village of Cape Goodwin. The heart of the matter, he discovers, is a dead woman whose killer remembers her as having a mouth so sweet 'it was like kissing a Hershey bar'.