1911. Disgraced after a case that should have made his career, Michael Stone is shipped out to Barbados — officially for a change of scenery, though his superiors are keeping something back. Before he's even reached the island, a murder aboard ship drags him straight back into the work he was meant to be leaving behind. With the unlikely help of a brilliant young Bajan inventor — whose homemade gadgets are decades ahead of their time — Stone begins piecing together a case that will shape everything that follows. A slow-burn historical mystery steeped in Edwardian atmosphere, colonial tension and Caribbean heat: the story of how it all began for Michael Stone.