In 1910, Olive MacLeod—a 30-year-old, redheaded Scottish aristocrat—received word that her fiancé, naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa—so she set out to find him. In jungles, swamps, cities, and deserts, Olive and her two companions come face-to-face with cobras and crocodiles, a murderous cult, and two lion cubs that she adopts as her own. Drawing on Olive's own letters and diaries, Brad Ricca follows this woman's incredible story, as she makes her way through a haunted forest to an Islamic warlord who may hold the key to Boyd's disappearance.