It started as a mystery with the promise of romance ... A chance meeting of two strangers in a deserted French hotel in the Mekong Delta starts them on a journey in search of elusive truths. He is Anton Faraday, a successful British wildlife painter hunting down a skilled forger of his work in Vietnam, while fighting doubts about his own integrity as an artist; and she is Caroline Brinkley, a freelance journalist from New Jersey searching for her adoptive Vietnamese brother, while looking for a scoop that will provide her with credentials as a serious journalist. Flirting with the idea of a romance, they travel together to the Northern Highlands, stumbling into a remote world gripped by fear and death. It is 2004, and the region is faced with an outbreak of SARS, the coronavirus known as Bird Flu. As the epidemic spreads, their past lives combine to push them forward into the heart of a high-stakes international conspiracy far beyond their capacity to withstand, uncovering evidence of corrupt charities, unscrupulous drug companies, and foreign agencies. With Vietnam's history, landscape and culture as a backdrop, their voyage together becomes as much about the geography of their own spirits and emotions as it is about the country through which they travel, raising complex moral and ethical questions as their emerging love is tested by the corruption they're forced to confront. With timely echoes of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener, the author raises questions about Big Pharma and state collusion that have never been more relevant than today.