Robert Louis Stevenson has become accustomed to the intense colors and severe humidity of Samoa, as well as the uninhibited sensuality of its people. Yet his thoughts turn nostalgically back to his native Edinburgh after a chance encounter with the newly arrived Scots missionary, Mr. Baker, whose religious invectives challenge Stevenson's loosening moral code. And when a young Samoan woman is raped and brutally murdered - someone for whom Stevenson privately pined - the once idyllic island erupts into a barely controlled insurgency.