Sergeant Ben Kella of the Solomon Islands Police Force is only a few days into a routine patrol, yet already he has been cursed by a magic man, stumbled across evidence of a cargo cult uprising and failed to find an American anthropologist who has been scouring the mountainous jungle in search of a priceless pornographic icon.To complicate matters further, at a local mission station Kella discovers the redoubtable Sister Conchita secretly trying to bury a skeleton _ then a mysterious gunman tries to kill her.Kella already has enough problems. Mission-educated yet an aofia, the traditional peacemaker of the islands, reluctantly the sergeant is forced to link up with Sister Conchita, an independent and rebellious young American nun, to track down the perpetrators of a series of bizarre murders. The combination of the witch-doctor policeman and the Praying Mary, set against one of the most beautiful yet dangerous and primitive areas of the South Pacific in 1960, proves combative yet unexpectedly successful.