Penhalonga, Manicaland, Rhodesia, 1918. A well-liked young teacher at a local mission school is found dead by a night-watchman - victim of a warthog's goring. Matabele ex-policeman Samuel Kumalo, only recently back from the war in France and Tanganyika, is highly sceptical; warthogs are not aggressive animals. His investigation opens up a can of writhing worms. The mission station, outwardly so pious and conservative, is a cover for some very dark activities. Kumalo's hunt for the killer becomes even more desperate when the night-watchman is found dead, and Kumalo's own young family is targeted.

The author began writing narrative verse while scarcely into his teens. This collection encompasses his experiences in war-torn Rhodesia in the sixties and seventies, as well as many tableaux of a purely Canadian nature. They range from 'A visit to the circus', and the trials and tribulations of an old dancing horse, to his 'In the Garden' a paean to gardening in North Vancouver. His songs, a number of which can be heard and seen on Youtube via the attached hyper-links, range from a fun-filled 'Martini Man' to 'The Prisoner', a song about race-bias in the North American justice system. His ballad 'The Last voyage of the Rosy Claire' has echoes of Gordon Lightfoot's Edmund Fitzgerald, but with a west coast setting. The song was inspired by the sinking of the BC Ferries' ship Queen of the North.

A beautiful Wedgwood biscuit barrel is part of a deceased estate. When the sealed top is removed by the new owner a wad of 100-year-old documents are found inside. One of the documents is a posthumous letter from an airman in the Royal Flying Corps in First World War France and sets off an investigation, the explosive results of which are revealed in the book. The book is set in 1914 Rhodesia and then moves to France and the killing fields of the Western Front.