A FOOTPRINT IN THE SAND . . .is an epic political comedy that opens with the death of treasure hunter Graham Dunne on a remote Indian Ocean island.

he legendary Fiery Cross of Goa may now never be found.

In London, Harry Stone, the Bureau Chief of an obscure Fleet Street agency, says to reporter Robert Walker, "Go to the island, find out what happened to Dunne. Human interest - there's your story, not the treasure. Stay out of politics and leave the women alone. And don't leave any footprints - not even one."

But stay out of politics? On far-away Bourbon Island, that's not so easy - where the ruthless, quasi-Marxist dictatorship of François Bellarmine tolerates no dissent - or journalist.

The Cold War was never quite like this as Robert Walker - an idiot savant for Harry Stone's agency - is either helped or hindered by a poly-ethnic cast of characters: meet Mr Swann (the suave, intellectual hotelier), Francis Long (the love-sick bartender), Harry Singh (the subversive plantation merchant), Bishop David Chin (the island's courageous priest), Mr & Mrs Albert Greene (the diffident British Attaché and his wife Sylvia), Mr Kite (antiquarian map dealer from Berlin), Dr Mobuto (the feathered-man from Zanzibar), Morgan Beaumont (a fall-guy for the Agency), and Barbara West - the perpetrator of a CIA honey-trap to ensnare a very willing victim of regime change . . .

As for Robert Walker: Brainwashed? "Who, me?"

THE COLD WAR IS OVER! LONG LIVE THE COLD WAR - in an epic political comedy that moves from London and Paris to the far-flung shores of the Indian Ocean . . .