The World Beat — Gaylord Dold

Mr. Winks and readers everywhere can only be impressed and delighted with this new adventure of Dold's vulnerable and complex private eye, Mitch Roberts, a thoughtful and sensitive man who can be tough when tested. For while The World Beat is a novel of enormous suspense, it is more than that.
Set in Zaire and the Republic of the Congo, the story evokes modern Africa with a realism that few writers achieve. At loose ends, Roberts takes an assignment from Lloyds of London to deliver the ransom for Elyse Revelle, a Belgian mining company's doctor who has been kidnapped, presumably by separatists. Together with a Zairian employee of the company, Roberts undertakes an arduous river journey to make contact with the kidnappers at the doctor's clinic in the jungle.
This journey, with its sights, sounds, and smells of Africa, is both actuality and metaphor. On the way, Roberts falls seriously, almost fatally ill, and the trip becomes a struggle to head off forces that are opposed to the mission, to find and pay off the kidnappers, and to elude death from disease or assassination.