In the remote Yukon of 1925, a lone prospector named Jack McCann spends an evening in a dusty, isolated brothel where a mysterious encounter changes the course of his life. There, a clairvoyant madam named Frieda grants him a strange stone and delivers a warning: if he finds gold, it will lead him toward a grim fate. The next day, while prospecting, Jack slips through a glacier and uncovers a hidden cache of gold. He returns to the brothel to confront the strange turn of events, only to find it deserted and fading into ruin; Frieda lies dying in the parlor, a quiet, haunting end to an odd encounter. Jack’s discovery quickly transforms him into one of the wealthiest men in the world, and the arc of his fortune begins to pull him toward a fate he cannot yet foresee.
Twenty years later, in 1945, Jack’s wealth sits like a gleaming fortress on a Caribbean island, where he lives in a sprawling estate named Eureka. Yet luxury does little to steady the restlessness that haunts him at home. His wife Helen is bored and alcoholic, while his daughter Tracy is headstrong and recently married to Claude Van Horn, a dissolute social climber whose ambitions clash with Jack’s growing paranoia. Jack’s trusted aide, Charles Perkins, keeps a wary watch over the shifting dynamics of power on the island, where outside interests—the Miami mob led by Aurelio D’Amato and the mastermind Mayakofsky—press to buy the property and turn Eureka into a casino. Beneath the glitter, greed, control, and whispered betrayals begin to fuse into a tense, suffocating atmosphere that hints at a deeper spiritually charged fracture.
As the family’s tensions intensify, Tracy makes a decisive break from her father, challenging Claude and the life he represents. Jack’s fear of losing control morphs into a conviction that those closest to him—especially Claude and Tracy—are trying to steal his soul, a fear that threads through every conversation and quarrel. In a night of rain and ritual, Claude and several friends attend a voodoo ceremony that devolves into an unsettling frenzy, while Aurelio and his men arrive on Eureka with a more direct plan to seize the island. Jack remains defiant, steadfast in his will to resist, but violence erupts: Pete, one of Aurelio’s associates, brutalizes Jack and then destroys him with a wrench, a blowtorch, and finally a cleaver, a sequence witnessed by Claude and Charles from nearby rooms.
The murder becomes a flashpoint of the island’s tangled web of loyalties and ambitions. Claude is arrested and charged with the crime, but after a dramatic exchange of testimony, including a powerful account from Tracy, he is acquitted due to a lack of conclusive evidence. The investigation concludes amid the wider backdrop of the Caribbean War’s end, and the judge orders Claude’s deportation from the island. A formal dinner marks his release, and Claude proposes selling Eureka and starting anew in France. Tracy, however, insists on a bolder, more generous gesture—she wishes to give the entire island away. Realizing that this path would only bring cruelty to those he loves, Claude quietly removes himself from the house, paddling away in a rowboat toward his sailboat as Tracy watches with tearful resolve. With the case unresolved and the island’s future hanging in the balance, Jack’s murder remains officially unsolved, leaving a lingering sense of mystery and the heavy weight of greed, power, and fear that still threads through Eureka.
Across the unfolding decades, the tale probes how wealth can fail to deliver peace, how love and loyalty are tested by ominous forces, and how the human yearning for control can blur into a darker pursuit of immortality and own ruin. The setting—dusty Yukon horizons meeting sunlit Caribbean shores—frames a story where occult symbolism and worldly ambitions collide, leaving a haunting impression of what a man will endure and what he might become when wealth and superstition intertwine.
