Tricky Business

The Extravaganza of the Seas is a five-thousand-ton cash cow, a top-heavy tub whose sole function is to carry gamblers three miles from the Florida coast, take their money, then bring them back so they can find more money. In the middle of a tropical storm one night, these characters are among the passengers it carries: Fay Benton, a single mom and cocktail waitress desperate for something to go right for once; Johnny and the Contusions, a ship's band with so little talent they are . . . well, the ship's band; Arnold and Phil, two refugees from the Beaux Arts Senior Center; Lou Tarant, a wide, bald man who has killed nine people, though none recently; and an assortment of uglies whose job it is to facilitate the ship's true business, which is money-laundering or drug-smuggling or . . . something.

Dave Barry is proud to have been elected Class Clown by the Pleasantville High School class of 1965. From 1983 to 2004, he wrote a weekly humor column for the Miami Herald, which in 1988 won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He is the author of some thirty books, including his bestselling Peter Pan prequels, written with Ridley Pearson; his Christmas story The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog; Class Clown; Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far); and I'll Mature When I'm Dead. Barry lives in Coral Gables, Florida, with his family and a domestic staff of forty-seven.