American environmental journalist Judith Theresa Bryan has fled to Tasmania after a fiasco in Queensland, Australia, where a deceptive environmentalist led her down the path to professional disgrace and cost her the job she loved.
But in Tasmania, she gets a new chance, albeit one tainted by the fact that the same man who deceived her before will once again be involved in the story.
But what a story! If she can pull it off.
Judith is given the plum assignment of recording a full-scale search for the elusive and probably extinct thylacine - Tasmanian Tiger - and unrestricted access to the files of the leading expert on the topic, grazier Bevan Keene, who will lead the expedition.
One immediate problem is that Keene dislikes and distrusts all journalists, and especially environmental journalists. He also is on record as saying that no sane Tasmanian grazier would admit to having seen a Tassie Tiger on or even near his own land!
On the subject of whether the animal actually exists, Keene is nothing short of disingenuous. First he admits to Judith that he, personally, has indeed seen the allegedly extinct 'tiger' , then denies having said any such thing. It is a problem that plagues Judith's involvement in the expedition - she doesn't trust Bevan Keene, he doesn't trust her, but they seem to be falling for each other at the same time. Her mind tells her one thing; her body quite a different story entirely!
Is Keene just a wolf, with all-too-realistic expectations of making the copper-headed Judith his next conquest? Or is he, as she sometimes almost believes, the human incarnation of the Tassie Tiger they are supposed to be seeking, with a legitimate place for her in the mystique that surrounds him?
Judith has no choice but to follow Bevan's lead through the Tasmanian wilderness in search of an animal that is supposedly extinct and a professional future that appears too often to be going in the same direction.
In the end, they find what Bevan Keene said all along that they were 'meant to find.' And they find each other.