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 a fire 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'.