Resort Isle deals with the shattered the life of San Diego Detective Frank Dugan as he endures the brutal murders of his young wife and two children at the hands of criminals who have revolved in and out of prison. Dugan cannot exact his revenge on these examples of humanity at its lowest, but he resolves to put them someplace where there can be no return to law-abiding society. A place where there will be no direct supervision, cell phones, or Internet, and no chance ever of escape.
The term “life without parole” in the prison system has become meaningless. Murderers return to society to murder again, and the death penalty is only carried out after the convicted felons are on Medicare. But Frank Dugan and a popular state’s attorney find an uninhabited island a hundred miles off the coast of California and convince the government to use it as a model experiment to give dehumanized inmates, who spend 23-hours a day locked up like kennel dogs, a chance at self-governing their numbers and, at the same time, practically eliminate recidivist crime and save the state $60,000 in annual costs to house and supervise a single inmate.
The island experiment gets legs and support comes from a most unexpected quarter: the inmates themselves. They are more than willing to trade a concrete box for a tropical isle in the palms, even though it’s surrounded by the densest population of man-eating sharks on the globe and several gunboats. Everything is going as the detective has envisioned. That is, until he gets framed for murder and sent to the island. He is dumped into the very community of deadly criminals he’s arrested and put at the island, killers who have little concern about further punishment for their acts.
