Namibia's skeleton coast. A place of vast dunes and rusting ship hulks, where the cold Benguela current rises dense ocean fogs, and black-maned lions eke out the last of their subspecies.

It once seemed to Irish scientist Ailidh Conroy that she could find water there. But her search for an aquifer left her with nothing but a Russian military cap and a baby on the way.

Twenty-four years later, when Ailidh's daughter Chalice is summoned to Africa, she seems likely to follow the same fatal path as her parents. Haunted by memoires of the Russian military cap that used to hang on her mother's bedroom door, Chalice is forced to reckon with the same dangers and mysteries that her parents faced before her. And that's all before Chalice finds, on the slippery ledges of the fabled underground aquifer, another set of human remains - those of her parents.

But as she discovers them, lions approach . . .

How will Chalice escape the twin threats, human and animal, that she faces? Is there a chance for her to lie to rest the mysteries of her past? And what does it mean for the lions, whether humans control the aquifer? These are the questions arising in a novel that continues Giles Foden's project of investigating abuse of power in Africa.