Ray Robertson has spent eleven and a half months serving with the United Nations in the world's newest country. He's tired of the chaotic traffic and jostling crowds that fill the narrow streets. Tired of the choking red dust that blows into the capital from the desert. He can't wait to get back to his wife and kids--and back to policing a world he understands.

But when a young woman--the fourth in three weeks--is found dead at the side of a dusty road with a thin white ribbon wrapped tightly around her neck, Robertson fears that a serial killer is on the loose. In a country plagued by years of extreme poverty, civil war and the struggle to establish a functioning government, the policeman realizes that it's up to him and his Dinka partner, John Deng, to find the killer before they can strike again.