Island trader and salt-sea philosopher, Captain Brian, broke and out of business, returns to the Virgin Islands from Venezuela with half his crew (the mutineers left behind in Cumana) and all his sails lost to a squall. A dodgy Fed, looking for the square grouper retrieved off Salt Island meets him at Customs and Immigration to persuade him to rat out his old buddy, Diver Vaughn. Brian refuses, and the narc relieves him of his forty-five and begins to dog him with the tenacity of a Javert. He reaches his home on St. Judas to learn another old buddy, Leif the Thief, a hydrophobic reprobate of the first order, has been found dead in a cistern. Brian blames a local gendarme for his friend's death.
Because the police don't much care Leif is murdered, young island heartthrob, Billie, lush and tropical, urges Brian to team up with her to solve Leif's murder. He's concerned her over-the-top antics will turn an investigation into a carnival and sink any chance of success and perhaps end up with them becoming outcasts on the island. Having already turned over half his T-shirt business to her for sweat equity, he's more concerned that a collaboration will draw them closer in friendship. He doesn't want to be her friend. No man wants to be a friend of a beautiful woman.
If you don't own a pair of flip-flops or a T-shirt with an off-color slogan, if beach sand in your clothes is too gritty and no-see-um bites on your arms and legs too itchy, if you detest the stickiness of salt drying on your skin or the trade wind mussing your hair, if you've never desired to dive for lobster, pry a conch from its shell, feast on whelk, or get high on mushroom tea, if you can't distinguish between a steel band and a speckled band, if you can't imagine visiting a community where the patois is melodic and the carnival is perpetual, if you don't believe in pirates, fairy dust, and little boys who never grow up, if you deny Jimmy Buffet is high culture, if you've buried the anarchist in you, if the ongoing conquest of Eden doesn't make you cry, you should probably not read this book. Just do your nine-to-five thing and save up for a cruise. We'll wave as you plow by in your floating city.
