This is along the lines of the television show LOST, with people on a cruise shipwrecked on a desert island. And this is a real desert island--all sand and rocks, though there are some strange plants that emerge from the sand. There are also people, other castaways, and the majority of them have bone white hair. All of the vegetables "natives" eat is grown from their own manure, which is carefully collected each day, and they also eat lots of fish. So it's very suspicious, at least to me, when a few of the castaways vanish and they have a big spare rib dinner that night. Eventually a few are let in on the big secret and some make plans to get away in a big balloon. Who will survive before the island's weird predators everyone?
When I started reading the first twenty-pages I thought this was as good as any James Rollins novel I've read. However, the longer I read, the less interested I became because I was able to anticipate what was going on or what was going to happen to the characters. Which is not fun for me, the reader.