There's something just a bit off about the new aid worker, Janet McCann. The tall redhead with flaming ringlets arrives in Laos on a steamy August morning in 1961, on the same day that Fred Jenkins, a poultry expert, is found floating face down in the Mekong. When Jack Gold visits the office of his deceased drinking buddy, he finds the redhead's long legs draped across his dead friend's desk. Gold's an Agency man, but it's not his job to investigate Jenkins' death. Not his job, that is, until the late poultry expert is suspected of having passed secrets to the Communists.