"The night before the turn of the millennium, a tour bus bound for a Louisiana casino is suddenly beamed inside a spaceship hovering high above the Earth's surface. As its twelve passengers emerge nervously from the vehicle, they come face-to-face with the being who has brought them aboard, a sixteen-fingered zoot-suited alien named Desi.
Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, Desi will seek their help as he readies himself for the final phase of the mysterious mission he has traveled across the galaxies to fulfill.".
"For decades, Desi has patiently studied the curious primary species of our planet, absorbing human culture from afar and occasionally bringing a chosen few aboard his ship to read their thoughts and experience their emotions with his telepathic powers. Over time, he has come to love Earth's confusing, fascinating, and frustrating inhabitants - and even taken a human wife, a gregarious former hairdresser from Alabama named Edna Bradshaw.".
"Now, to complete his mission, Desi must position his ship in full and irrefutable view of the people of Earth and descend to the planet's surface at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve."--BOOK JACKET.
Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection *A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain* was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
