One bitter winter day an exhausted man arrives on his doorstep. He has travelled from Nairobi to bring Mark a message. Mark’s father, Neil Shaw – a buccaneering figure, big game hunter, best selling novelist and womaniser – has been arrested for murder. Mark had been brought up in Spain after his mother had been killed on their remote estate in Kenya. Now he returns, to discover a dangerous situation on the lonely Plateau which both sets of his grandparents, together with one other family, the Donaldsons, had colonised in the 1920s.