As the novel opens, Kate Carrington, a pediatric nurse and wife of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore City, is leaning over the deck of the SS Tropical Sea, contemplating suicide. Deciding that the Caribbean Sea was too beautiful a place in which to die, she leaves the ship and walks boldly into a new world.
Kate leaves behind everything she holds dear, to live in a place that she knows nothing about and where the people rival the fauna...