Fateful Flies

'Fateful Flies' transports the Young and the Not-So-Young to a tropical paradise in the African Rift Valley. Local inhabitants, flora, fauna and wonderful scenery spring to life; but vicious bandits lurk behind baobabs. Enthralled at first in a happy, exotic holiday, readers end up chewing their fingernails. 'Fateful Flies' tells of dramatic days on a vast inland sea. The story is based on hair-raising events that really happened to the author and her son when they lived near the great lake and cruised on it in their sailing dinghy. Daphne's sympathetic and deep knowledge of the territory, its wildlife 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. Huge grey clouds, like waterspouts, move ominously across the waves. Each is made of millions of miniscule midges and if a cloud catches you, to breathe is to find your lungs full of the tiny creatures. You suffocate, drowned in minute insects. Other people, panic-stricken, escape as fast as possible from the fogs of gnats, but the cousins are actually planning to collect samples of the Lake Flies Are they mad? A terrifying cyclone and desperate guerrillas, so starved that they have resorted to cannibalism, combine to snarl the adventurers' idyllic holiday into a nightmare ordeal. Can the cousins overcome impossible odds? Deep, threatening war drums throb through the explosive ending.