For seven years she's delivered "packages," without any major problems until now. When her contact, Joey, a slick Key West handler, asks her to pick up a computer disk at a seedy bar in Bremerton and deliver it to Houston, something goes terribly awry. The man with the disk is shot dead in the men's room and Allie resorts to below-the-belt fighting tactics in order to escape with her life. Not sure where to turn, since her father recently passed away, Allie hits the night highway to find someone she can trust.

Her journey leads her from Seattle to Key West. Along the way she comes in contact with a variety of impressive characters, each one living a tragic life of his or her own. As information is slowly sucked out of her strange assortment of friends, Allie discovers the murder of her contact and the scramble over the all-important computer disk are tied up with a highly confidential and atrocious mission sanctioned by the CIA during Vietnam.

Debut novelist Jenny Siler's powerful prose is both beautifully poetic and unbearably cynical. In fact, the novel seeps with a dark pessimism that continues even until the final page:

"Whenever doubts arise about my profession, I picture myself in a spacious suburban kitchen pulling tuna casserole out of a clean oven, going to a hateful job, letting a man I don't desire into my body, and I know I've made the right choice."

The bloody road trip comes to a highly suspenseful, shoot-out ending, but it's ultimately unsatisfying. The past was bleak, the present dark, and the future...? It looks no different. So, despite the remarkable prose and brilliantly thorough character development, Siler's unfaltering somber tone prevents the reader from closely connecting with the heroine and, ultimately, the novel.

--Whitney Rose Anderson