In a remote area of Northern Kenya, activist Tessa Quayle is found brutally murdered. Tessa's companion, a doctor, appears to have fled the scene, and all the evidence points to a crime of passion. Members of the British High Commission in Nairobi assume that Tessa's widower, their mild-mannered and unambitious colleague Justin Quayle, will leave the matter to them. Haunted by remorse and jarred by rumors of his late wife's infidelities, Quayle surprises...

A pilot lands work for the CIA and as a drug runner in the south during the 1980s.