Fun Loving Finn

Four Finn Briscoe adventures: 1) Smuggling pot from Mexico to Massachusetts as a wild and wide-eyed Amherst College freshman from Missouri. 2) Three hippies are on a road trip from Missouri to Florida when their car blows up in Atlanta. They crash at the Salvation Army while looking for a $100 set of wheels, but can they keep the pet clownfish alive? 3) Finn and friends get construction jobs with a bunch of prisoners on daytime work release—who corrupts who? 4) Finn comes back to Missouri and gets work on the Mississippi River.

Finn spins a captivating memoir story about two college freshmen who have a hare-brained drug smuggling scheme. It’s the spring of 1970, and hippy culture is in full bloom. After a road trip down Route 66 to Arizona in a '55 Chevy, their plan is to import at least 50 pounds of marijuana from Mexico to Massachusetts over spring break. If they make it, the pot-smoking hippies could each make a cool couple of grand. Plan B is prison.

Another road trip in the Fun Loving Finn series, this one finds Finn and friends heading southeast from Missouri to Florida. Finn got a good number in the crazy Vietnam lottery and decides to learn something about life in the real world and drops out of college. When their car breaks down in Atlanta and they’re short on cash, they hole up at the Salvation Army and try to find a new ride while protecting the only possession anybody cares about: his friend Stan’s fish. Will these teenage hippies find a ride, get ripped off, or make it safely to Florida with the fish?

Finn and Drew, partners from the Rookie Reefer Bandidos caper smuggling pot from Mexico to Massachusetts, hook up again, this time in Florida. With good numbers in the Vietnam lottery, they're free to drop out of college and pursue simple hedonism. When they get on tying steel at a construction site in Delray Beach, it turns out their colleagues are a jovial lot of prisoners on work release from the Florida State Penitentiary.

Finn’s next job takes him out on the Mississippi where a redneck boss isn’t fond of long haired hippies. Will the first mate kick "Mary Jane’s" ass bust him for pot, or go home to find the donkey man who’s screwing his wife? If Mark Twain were a baby boomer coming of age during the Vietnam War, maybe he'd have written about the adventures of Finn Briscoe. But since the great Missouri scribe is long gone, Finn himself is doing his best to carry on the literary tradition of his native state.

Finn just wants to communicate with the señoritas, but gets a lot more in the bargain. In small towns set in splendor, whether in the mountains or by the sea, he is blessed with the friendship and hospitality of the Mexican people: honest, simple, and decent. This is education!

Finn runs into Claudette and two friends while camping out on an island off the Mexican Caribbean a few years before Cancun even exists. She brings a slice of paradise with her into Finn's hammock, as the sand and the sea are the backdrop for two unforgettable weeks on Isla Mujeres and a pristine beach next to the coastal Mayan ruins of Tulum. Is paradise lost in the end or can the moment live forever in blissful memory?