It's 1943 in Victoria Park, Auckland, New Zealand. American marines are newly arrived and quickly overstaying their welcome as native men take umbrage to their drunken antics, unrestrained hormones, and luck with the local girls. Thirty-two-year-old Captain Peter Sokol, a surgeon for the U.S. Marines, finds himself once again at odds with his longtime nemesis, former med school classmate and brother-in-law, the wealthy Major Thomas Cartwright. The two have fallen in love with the same seductively beautiful and enigmatic woman, Emily Walters.

Dismissive of Emily's suspicously British mother, dead psychiatrist father, eccentric elderly butler and her violent, forbidding brother Oscar, the two vie for her hand with a ferocity that surprises neither. Sokol makes a brash decision that will change his life just as tensions between the locals and the marines are coming to a head. The nineteen-year-old Tony Sturgis and his friends have been frequenting a Chinese cathouse where a woman is discovered dead. Shortly after, Oscar Walters is murdered and Sokol is the prime suspect. As he fights to prove his innocence, he finds that the woman he loves is not quite who she seems and the blood of another might be on his hands.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
NICHOLAS EDLIN was born and raised in Christchurch, New Zealand. He has a BA in English and Political Science from Canterbury University, and a law degree from Victoria University. He has worked as a solicitor in Wellington and Auckland, New Zealand, and as a legal adviser at the Treasury Solicitor's Department in London, where he now lives. This is his first novel.