The complexities of African tribal ritual clash with police methods to produce unique problems for a different kind of private eye. The beginning was the discovery of the naked and headless body of a white man lying on a sacred rock known as "the thumb-print of God" above a river in the West African republic of Akhana. A strange case for the services of a doctor whose skills would obviously be useless -- but Dr. Quarshie's talents include not only medicine bu sleuthing. How and why Quarshie's wife went looking for a girl and ended up getting bitten by a man is only one in a chain of increasingly menacing events in which the attempt to ling up a lost head and a lost life with a lost identity present some unpleasant surprises even for the astute and unflappable Dr. Quarshie.