Angel's Luck is the name of his spaceship, and Captain James May is having a hard time making his installment payments to the Yueh-sheng (think Asian Yakuza) who owns the title. He gets into trouble, and barely manages to get out of it again, usually by making things worse. While I wasn't too pleased with the characterization, the book was like a train wreck in motion. I wanted to look away, but wanted to know 'how-they-got-out-of-it-this-time'.
The 'drunken' adjective is earned by Captain May doing most of his negotiation in bars, and you won't go more than 25 pages without one character or another drinking or getting drunk. This serves to frequently complicate the plot line.
I didn't like the story enough to follow the series, because Captain May is a jerk to the people he works with, even the people who might help him. In the second half of the book, the perspective switches over to Duke, so perhaps the author realized this and tried a fix, but it didn't redeem the novel. Duke has some development, and I was starting to like him when the book ended, but I didn't like him *enough*.
