ISBN: 9780732279196
First published April 2005.

In 1897, Ronald Preston, a young civil engineer, takes his new bride, Florence, to Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast of Africa to begin construction of a railway line through an unchartered wilderness.

But Preston realises the Uganda Railway, later branded the ‘Lunatic Line’, is no place for a woman. Ahead lie hostile tribes, dense jungles and brutal thorn-bush deserts where his wife would be the only white woman among ten thousand men.

In the four years building the railway he must overcome political intrigues in far-away London, his taciturn caravan master who is haunted by memories of his hot-blooded woman, and a fellow engineer whose obsession with the man-eaters of Tsavo leads him into dangerous ground.

When his crewmembers are brutally killed, Preston stalks a predator more treacherous than the lions.

With the Author behind the Scenes of Beyond Mombasa

I had a ball writing Beyond Mombasa. It’s such a great yarn, packed with unimaginable adventures – all true.

I finished the first draft in record time – just three months. I knew the story of the construction of the railway from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria very well. It was one of my favorites, full of adventure. My ‘script’ was the construction project rolling the railway line out over East Africa at the end of the 19th century, only a few years after the first Europeans had risked marching into that unknown territory.

There had been a number of historical accounts of the building of the railway, but the thing that fascinated me was that Florence Preston – a woman who had stood by her man over four years and the laying of a thousand kilometers of railway track – was not given a mention in the official history.

Florence was not the first or the last woman to experience the savagery and hardships of life in those days, but so far as I was concerned hers was the story of the ‘Lunatic Express’, as it was called by a British Parliamentarian of the day.