Carolyne Mider is on the Dark Continent's exotic island of Zanzibar in the capacity of "barefoot doctor", providing medical assistance to the locals ... attending the Institute of Kiswahili and Foreign Languages ... and collecting ingenious holistic folk medicines.

Dirk Johnson is on Zanzibar researching one of his popular history books, this one including the romantically exotic island's long and volatile involvement, past and present, in the nefarious slave and in the once-lucrative clove trades.

Carolyne and Dirk, also, have a shared clandestine reason for being where they are, doing what they're doing. Will Carolyne and Dirk, as well as their burgeoning love, survive machinations tied to the 1964 revolution that killed thousands of Zanzibar land owners and put the island's economy into the debilitating chaos that endures to this very day?