Having survived a deadly assault, Mellissa Harris was taken to hospital, where she was put into a medically induced coma.

Whilst unconscious, she was transported back in time to relive the life of her 19th-century namesake, an English girl called Mellissa Goodchild, who was an abolitionist. She married the son of an English landowner, and she and her new husband set off to Jamaica immediately after their marriage to run a sugar plantation which had been newly bought by her father-in-law and her husband. The plantation was worked by nearly 400 slaves.

Is it a 21st-century detective story? Yes, some of it.

Is it a 21st-century life-and-death hospital drama?
Yes, some of it.

But mainly, it is a 19th-century slave story set in Jamaica during the build-up to the Christmas slave rebellion of 1831-32. And it is a love story between the abolitionist wife of a white sugar plantation and slave owner, and an African slave, both unwittingly caught up in the rebellion.