If Allie McGill had dreamed that the holiday cruise on the MV Pelican, the floating campus student cruise ship, would develop into such an extraordinary series of adventures, she would not have gone and she never, ever would have taken her mother. As it was, however, she and her mother, Maggie, are pitched into an amazing adventure. The lovely, relaxed cruise becomes both a riddle and a grave danger. Before they know it, Maggie and Allie are in the middle of a developing mystery of a missing person, a ruthless criminal and two mysterious deaths. Why have they been targeted as a special threat to the arch criminal? On board the ship Maggie and Allie meet an extraordinary cast of characters and friendships develop as the ship sails on along the coast of Central America and through the Panama Canal. Who is the mysterious soft-spoken holy man and what is his role in the mysteries? Has Allie finally met "the one?" A shipboard romance develops as Allie and Maggie struggle to unravel the many threads of this complex mystery.