Diana Forrest abandons a bad marriage, rejoins the Foreign Service and is sent to counter Soviet disinformation in Tanzania, where bribery corrupts the socialist ideal and elephant lovers are battling ivory poachers.
Toggling between a diffident boss and a hard-to-please Ambassador in a country that turns out to be a media wasteland, Diana spends weekends in the bush, usually with a Tanzanian colleague, whom she probably likes too much. Safari life involves her with local hunters who aren't above petty poaching. The worst of them is covering up the murder of a headman adamantly opposed to the ivory racket.
Diana will be on probation for a year. Then what? Even if she can stay in the Foreign Service, she may not.
Meanwhile, Diana is making friends: a pair of baboon-loving primatologists; an American visa officer who actually says “yes”; a beer-dispensing village nurse; a park ranger too honest for his own safety; a professor desperate to keep her daughter; a French social worker dreading the results of a lover’s HIVntest; a Tanzanian secretary married to a smuggler; a roots-seeking, African-American fashionista; an embittered Tanzania-born Pakistani in the transport business; and courtly old Suleiman, a safari chef, whose snores are as resonant as lions’ roaring.
Those lions aren’t bit players. They move things along, as do the elephants, hippos, wildebeest, impala, cape buffalo, warthogs, baboons and malaria mosquitoes.
There’s serious stuff in this slice of the diplomatic life, all wholly relevant in these days of Russian disinformation and a revived Cold War. But Poachers isn’t a tract. You see. You feel. You care. About the people. About the wildlife. About the resilience of the land. And there you are, on the savannah, leaning happily against an old termite mound, far from your companions—and way too far from the loaded rifle....
Um...sorry. No lions attack. No elephants charge. Diana tells the story, but it isn’t only hers. Think of a knockout engagement ring: a major brilliant wonderfully enhanced by the smaller sparklers encircling it.
P.S. There's lots of humor, too.
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