With the closing of the country’s elite crime-fighting unit, the Scorpions, Abigail Bukula is compelled to take a sabbatical. She had been seconded to that body and had become one of their most enthusiastic and successful operatives. 

The Department of Justice wants to retain her, but her intense loyalty to some of the senior people in that now defunct organisation means that, for the moment, she is in the way. Almost at the same time as these events are taking place, seven activists have gone missing in Zimbabwe. They seem to have been arrested, but that country’s government claims not to have them in custody. 

Even the former opposition people who have now formed the government of national unity with the old dictatorship can only suggest that perhaps the seven have left the country. Abigail, who practiced briefly in Zimbabwe in the 1990s, is contacted for help. Activists there believe that the missing people are being held in that country’s notorious Chikurubi prison, which is still controlled by members of the old guard and where prisoners are dying daily. They want a court order that will force the authorities to open the prison to a search. 

Among the missing seven is a cousin Abigail never knew she had. She discovers that he is a talented writer, who has been a thorn in the side of the government and is told that he is the child of an aunt who died in the government’s Gukuruhandi massacres of the Matabeles in the early 1980s. 

With her forced sabbatical, Abigail agrees to help. She reads her cousin’s writing and finds sections that puzzle her. In trying to understand him, she turns for help to criminologist Yudel Gordon who she has not seen for years. He will later follow her to Zimbabwe. An already hazardous mission is further complicated by a powerful attraction Abigail feels for a director of Zimbabwe’s notorious Central Intelligence Organisation. Her husband’s recent continuing unfaithfulness has had a devastating effect on her. 

She is almost unable to resist the impulse that compels her towards this powerful man. With the threatening collapse of her marriage, no sexual boundaries seem to exist between herself and him. Abigail is torn between her desires and the knowledge that Jonas Chunga, who claims innocence, has probably played a central role in the evil that has gripped Zimbabwe for decades. 

Through her confusion, she and Yudel have to deal with the authorities to find the missing activists. During their quest, they uncover an aspect of Chunga’s life that no one could have anticipated. The success and tragedy that follow are all affected by the complex power web in a country still in the grip of the dictatorship of the past.