Presumed Dead is a fast-paced social thriller that's a Roots for the New Millennium.
Three African-American teens are missing. To a LAPD detective, it looks like Professor Ken Chestnut's teaching assistant, Jason Duffy, is guilty. When Duffy is arrested, Chestnut hires a lawyer and learns that the only thing that will save the grad student from death row is for the missing children to return home alive and well. Chestnut sets out to find the youths and the cooling trail of evidence leads him to a face-off with his professional nemesis, Scott Kenyatta, an unscrupulous Oxford Professor and African Prince who has taken the children to the Congo. Chestnut finds the youths living among a diminutive "hunter and gathering" clan called the Efe. He fully expected his mission on the African Continent to be a difficult one. But what he didn't anticipate was becoming a key component of Kenyatta's bizarre sociological research project that's using the torrid unforgiving Ituri Rain Forest as its laboratory. This odyssey turns out to be a contemporary Roots for the foursome. When they return to civilization, they bring back fresh perspectives of where they came from, who they are and what they might become.