Safe Delivery

Jerri Johnson used to think she wanted to teach, but she works instead for Sam�s Investigating Services in downtown San Antonio. Tracking down bail jumpers and serving subpoenas isn�t a romantic way to make a living, but San Antonio, even in the sweaty summer, is a city of ghosts. Jerri is haunted by memories of a love affair with Vincent Fuentes, a Mexican intellectual who has returned to San Antonio and is trying to enlist her in a radical plot involving running guns across the border. Her friend Joe Parr, an aging Texas Ranger, is visited at night by the ghost of his wife, but by day he keeps an eye on Jerri, Vincent Fuentes, and Vincent�s father, Palo, a retired gangster who is now a solid citizen of San Antonio�s West Side. From the city�s shady riverbanks and dark bars to the backyards of the well-to-do, there is tragedy in the way this atmospheric story plays itself out. But above all there is the ambiguity of a world where moral distinctions are as fuzzy as the humid air of San Antonio, a world where no one is young enough to draw fine distinctions between right and wrong.

�Safe Delivery is a wonderful and unique mixture of a smart crime novel, a classy love story, and a hard vision of the Southwest. I loved it from beginning to end.��James Crumley