Walter San Nicolas is what you’d charitably call a professional fuck-up.

A former infomercial pitchman who had exactly one recorded success, a sort of preternatural precursor to the ShamWow. Walt rode a brief wave of fame straight into a wall of lawsuits, scams, and humiliating public appearances. His second act didn’t fare much better. Reinventing himself as “Walt Jensen,” a late-night real-estate guru and creator of the now-under-investigation Dare to Dream: Turning Tough Breaks Into Big Breaks, a real estate pyramid scheme dressed up as motivational empowerment and loosely held together by buzzwords, late-night TV, and what you might call “light fraud.”

Also, he sees things. Which he had blamed on a brain tumor he had been falsely diagnosed with, by a completely different fraud. So No tumor. No explanation. Just a new reality where reality itself was kind of iffy. The drinking helped.

Then, midway through a failed suicide attempt, Walt’s phone rang: his brother, Eli, was dead. Heroically. In Yemen. Saving a village of orphans and one endangered species of fish. So, against his better judgment—or more accurately, against his will, Walt returned to Guam for an 18-day Chamorro funeral he didn’t ask for, for a brother he hadn’t spoken to in over twenty years.

A reluctant homecoming takes a strange turn when Walt stumbles into a decades-old conspiracy involving missing money, multiple bodies, and a mildly vengeful Japanese straggler with very unfinished business. Along the way, he reconnects with his chaos-prone nephew, his boat-dwelling best friend, and an existential hitman with a surprisingly gentle touch. As the bodies stack up, so do the family secrets, and, of course, the betrayals.