Neal Pilchard, an unemployed English professor, is hired to drive a venture capitalist’s luxury car from North Carolina to Chicago. Along the way he crashes while drag racing, gets himself in a dangerous entanglement with a repo man’s wife, and rescues the capitalist’s ne’er-do-well son from a pair of mob enforcers. But this is just the beginning of Neal’s misadventures. The simple driveaway turns into a race across the country, a wild ride through crime, violence, role-playing, and romance.