Between Oceans

Crooks, Creeps, and Crazies on the Isthmus

By: Roan St. John

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Between Oceans: Crooks, Creeps, and Crazies on the Isthmus
Expats on the Isthmus — Book Two

“I thought escaping was enough.
I didn’t realize I would spend years turning my life into a manuscript and my mistakes into currency.”

Paradise is easier to survive once you stop pretending it’s perfect.

Three years after leaving Malpaís, Maya Warwick lives alone in a stone farmhouse outside Aix-en-Provence, surrounded by lavender fields, Mediterranean light, and a past she prefers to keep carefully edited. Her husband Lucien is dead. Officially, there was no body—only a fragment of bone recovered from the sea. For Maya, that was sufficient.
She tells herself she merely left at the right moment. That erasing a warning and its traces was self-preservation, not participation. Most days, she believes it. On others, her conscience resurfaces—persistent and impossible to silence—forcing her to ask whether what she feels is guilt, regret… or relief.

Her carefully constructed exile fractures with the arrival of William Balthazar Hastings, a man who speaks in measured tones, offers nothing freely, and knows far more about her than he should. He represents institutions Maya has spent her life studying—organizations that do not threaten, do not argue, and do not forget. They simply wait.
He wants her to return to Malpaís. She refuses—until he reveals that Lucien’s missing cell phone has been recovered, and its history reconstructed. The message. The deletion. The silence.

The leverage is precise. And devastating.

Forced back to the Isthmus under the cover of an online magazine, Maya re-enters a world of expats, fugitives, and hidden networks. Everyone has a story. Some want redemption. Others want reinvention. A few are running from things that should never have followed them.

As she gathers information, Maya begins to see patterns she had only sensed before—the quiet machinery of power, the ways systems identify weakness and apply pressure without ever revealing their true objectives. The assignment she has been given is only a surface layer. Beneath it lies a larger game, one that reaches far beyond Malpaís.

Hastings’s interest in her proves as calculated as it is temporary. When he disappears after getting what he needs, Maya is left with familiar wreckage—and a new clarity.

She begins to understand that survival in Malpaís is not about escaping danger. It is about recognizing the structures that produce it.

And learning how to use them.

Because in Malpaís, experience is never wasted.

Secrets don’t stay buried.

And stories, once told, have a way of becoming weapons.