Fateful Flies transports the Young and the Not-So-Young to a tropical paradise in the African Rift Valley. Local inhabitants, wonderful scenery and wildlife appear vividly; but vicious bandits are lurking behind baobabs. Enthralled at first in a happy, exotic holiday, readers end up chewing their finger-nails. The story tells of dramatic days on a vast inland sea. It is based on hair-raising, events that really happened to the author and her son when they lived near a great lake in The African Rift Valley and cruised on it in their sailing dinghy. Daphne's sympathetic and deep knowledge of the territory and of its fauna, flora and romantic deserted islands, spins a spell that has the reader seeing, hearing, and even smelling the experiences that delight or terrify the cousins who are the stars this book. Vast grey clouds, like waterspouts, move ominously across the waves. Each is made of millions of minute midges and if a cloud catches you, to breathe is to find your lungs full of the tiny creatures. You suffocate, drowned in miniscule insects. Other people, panic-stricken, escape as fast as possible from the columns, but the cousins are actually planning to collect samples of the Lake Flies by sailing into the swarms Are they mad? A cyclone and desperate guerrillas, so starved that they have become cannibals, combine to skew the adventurers' idyllic sailing holiday. They are captured and imprisoned on an impregnable rock pinnacle. Round its base crocodiles are devouring the stinking remains of previous prisoners who, trying to flee, have fallen to grisly deaths. Will the cousins manage a terrifying escape? Deep, threatening war drums throb through the explosive ending.