Kip Weston, young scion of a fabulously wealthy American family, has become a fugitive, wanted by the police. Out of money and desperate, he flees his seedy quarter of Paris one step ahead of a private detective and heads for the countryside. Here, he takes a job on the Celeste, a small tourist barge plying the canals of Burgundy. But Kip quickly finds that in running from one peril he has landed in far greater danger from another. A tale of mounting suspense, it ends in a spasm of violence that resolves the plot's many threads. For all its shocks and plot twists, TO LIVE AND DIE IN THE FLOATING WORLD is driven by the secrets and conflicted motives of a vivid cast of characters: Diane, the boat's owner, once beautiful but now wracked by alcohol and her fear of a powerful former lover; Dilip, the boat's Sri Lankan skipper with a deadly secret, his wish to become a Buddhist monk now reduced to trying to protect his beloved Diane; Brigitte, the beautiful and enigmatic passenger Kip falls in love with, despite warnings that she "belongs" to the rich and murderous Marius Carbonne, whose presence looms over everyone in this perilous floating world. While Holgate's critically acclaimed novels have previously been set in the exotic locales he knew as a diplomat, To Live and Die In the Floating World hearkens back to his time as a part of the four-member crew of the Wirreanda, a French tourist boat that serves as the model of the Celeste.