When Richard Delmore and his lover Sofie Cerruti decide to escape from the confines of their affair in the Twin Cities, they choose the white sands of Zanzibar and the verdant slopes of the outer lip of the Ngorongoro Crater as their romantic destination. It's a temporary paradise they're after, a reprieve from the limitations of the life of deception they lead in the States.
But once they begin their safari through the Serengeti the two lovers become spiritually lost in the teeming yet inhospitable plains of East Africa, where they are forced not only to deal with the consequences of the truths they have kept from each other—the deeper and darker secrets that are painfully worked out allegorically through the events that surround them—but to observe the contrast between their "civilized" and sophisticated lives in Minnesota, and the primitive and sometimes primordial world they have entered.
Clay Reynolds says, "I fell into the story easily, and the deeper I went into it I found myself more and more compelled by it and by the strong characters and counterpointing story...with stylistic flavorings reminiscent of Hemingway, Robert Ruark, and Paul Bowles, among other great writers of Africa, the novel displays the best of writing about the 'Dark Continent' but without becoming imitative or derivative. Detail is astonishing in places, with vivid scenes that are very difficult to write out drawn with almost photographic clarity. A Place of Timeless Harmony is fresh and surprising, and in places rises to a critical mass in its descriptive power."