When Guy Radford goes to visit an old college friend on the West Indian island of St Marien, he is blissfully unaware of the trouble he is flying into. For St. Marien is an island on the brink of revolution, where divisions of race and wealth have created such tensions between desperate workers and powerful plantation owners that a violent showdown is inevitable. When Radford unwittingly becomes caught in the crossfire he finds his own life in danger. And, as the conflict intensifies, the fact that he has fallen in love adds merely one more complication to an already tricky situation...