Malta 1575. Deep in the Grandmaster's prison in Valletta there languishes Isaac, who was caught and made a slave when an Order of Malta's vessel on a pirate raid captured the vessel with Isaac on board.

Isaac was on his way to the Levant where he intended to begin a business trading silk and perfumes. But since he was a non-Christian, a Jew, he was imprisoned in the Valletta jail.

Isaac was a man of great ingenuity with the gift of the gab added. He could talk his way out of many tight corners but in Malta's jail it looked as if his luck had run out.

Joseph, a Maltese slave runner, intended to make some money out of him by selling him as a slave on the oars. Isaac knew that his life would end in the atrocious conditions of galley slaves where men were treated worse than animals.

He was saved from this imminent hell by the arrival of Sister Assunta, a huge and burly nun who was more than a match for Joseph. But even she could not come up with the small sum that Joseph demanded to release him. At the very last minute a Maltese courtesan came up with the difference.

Isaac was reprieved but he was still a slave and still in Malta when all he wanted was to be reunited with his lover, Hannah Levi, like him a Jew, who was known as the best midwife in the Venice ghetto or Giudecca.

Her story begins when her fame as a midwife had spread out of the ghetto and attracted the attention of a very rich noble, a count, whose wife had been in labour for some days and who risked dying as well as her unborn child. In desperation the count pleaded with Hannah to use her renowned skills and save his wife and the baby.

Hannah hesitated. Jewish midwives were forbidden to touch Christian women and were things to go wrong it was not unheard of the Christians to invade the ghetto with a pogrom as a result.

It was only because of the immense love Hannah had for her lover that made her risk everything.

The book describes the hard conditions in Malta (this was just 10 years after the Great Siege, though the book does not mention it) and the even harder conditions in the Venice Giudecca, with the plague rampant.

It describes immense love between Hannah and Isaac but also the bad characters that were to be found both in Malta and Venice.