Sergeant Akal Singh, an unwilling transplant to Fiji, is just starting to settle into his life in the capital city of Suva when he is sent to the neighboring island of Ovalau on a series of fool’s errands. First: investigate strange reports of Germans, thousands of miles from the front of World War I. Second: chaperone two strong-willed European ladies, Mary and Katherine, on a sight-seeing tour. And third: supervise the only police officer currently on Ovalau, an 18-year-old constable with a penchant for hysterics. Akal and his friend, Taviti, become embroiled in a series of local issues: the gruesome death of an unpopular local and the imprisonment of a group of Norwegian sailors in Taviti’s uncle’s village. To add to Akal’s woes, Katherine, the charming aspiring journalist, harbors an agenda of her own.

1914, Fiji: Akal Singh would rather be anywhere but this tropical paradise. After a promising start to his police career in Hong Kong, Akal has been sent to Fiji as punishment for a humiliating professional mistake. Lonely and grumpy, Akal plods through his work and dreams of getting back to Hong Kong or his native India. When an indentured Indian woman goes missing from a sugarcane plantation and Fiji’s newspapers scream “kidnapping,” the inspector-general reluctantly assigns Akal the case. Akal, eager to achieve redemption, agrees --- but soon finds himself far more invested than he ever could have expected. Not only is he now investigating a disappearance, he is confronting the brutal realities of the indentured workers’ existence and the racism of the British colonizers in Fiji.