It's 1968 and one communal house in West London, home to the last, desperate remnants of an Aboriginal tribe, echoes with drum-calls and unintelligible chants. And it reeks of blood-the animal blood used in divination rituals and the blood of the tribe's murdered chief. Detective Jimmy Pibble specializes in the peculiar, but he's never before had to play anthropologist. How do you solve a crime when you don't speak the language and you don't understand the community's most basic assumptions-like what makes a woman different from a man, or how one tells the dead from those who are still among the living?