Every year the storks would set off on their miraculous 12,000-mile migration from Northern Europe to Central Africa. One year, inexplicably, some of them fail to return. At the invitation of a wealthy Swiss ornithologist, a young French academic, Louis Antioch, agrees to help solve the mystery of the birds' disappearance and prepares to undertake a journey tracing the flight of the storks. Before he can set off on his quest, however, his patron is found dead is bizarre circumstances.
Antioch's investigations lead him on a desperate and dangerous mission; one which develops into a personal odyssey that takes him from the mountains of Switzerland to a Bulgarian gypsy encampment, from an Israeli kibbutz in the Occupied Territories to the depths of the African jungle, and ultimately to Calcutta, where a ghastly and gruesome truth emerges.
