It's 2001 and the skies of Britain are black with stinking smoke as 6 million sheep and cattle
carcasses are incinerated to combat a picornavirus; cattle fed on animal remains have
developed Mad Cow Disease, a fatal form of which has infected the brains of humans eating
their meat. Gram, a teenager on the brink of a university education he mistrusts, looks to his
father for a response, a sign there can be a better world. But Stanley Blackster, a hero to his
son back in the days when he fought Slingjaws and Jactators on TV, has since become
somehow distracted, drawn inwards and away. Gram can see that his formidable mother The
Barracuda is beginning to despise Stanley. But now Insidiator is to be re-screened - could the
hero rise again?

Stanley must rouse himself: an expedition to the paradise islands of the Papalinas would
surely put things right again for the Blacksters. After all, hadn't The Barracuda once so
wanted to see this exotic place from his past? And Gram would finally see for himself the
doomed glories of the coral reef. OK, certain firmly submerged incidents were already
beginning to stir, but the Blacksters would not be straying from the sun, the sand, the surf
and the reef. Tsaramaso Atoll would be at a safe distance of several hundred long sea miles
and Stanley would make sure it stayed that way. Of course he would.

Even now Tsaramaso was a place undiscovered by the world, a place of mangrove forest and
steaming heat, of giant reptiles and strange birds, of teeming reef fishes and sweating black
nights. And of sharks. The ancestral home of the malevolent Boniface clan and their old, eerie
notions of power.

The very last place to take your family.