Easy Money (Hardcover)

Allie is a courier. She learned her trade in Florida at her widowed father's knee: "In the Keys smuggling has always been a kind of family business, like farming in the Midwest. I knew several boys my age who helped their fathers or uncles on runs. None of my friends had paper routes or summer jobs busing tables. We learned early where the real money was to be made."

The 27-year-old Allie, a former cocaine addict has learned many lessons well - she knows where to get false I.D.s, how to change her appearance with hair dye and contact lenses, how to floor her Mustang and pack a Walther in the back of her jeans after fastening a small holster around her ankle and sliding a Beretta inside.

But she needs more than underworld savvy to save herself when she becomes the object of a nationwide manhunt, after being set up for murders she did not commit.

With her cadre of scurrilous friends and a tongue at the ready with four-letter epithets, Allie is not an especially endearing heroine. It is to the author's credit that we do care about Allie and pull for her to get out of a seemingly inextricable situation.

Not at all particular about what she picks up or delivers, Allie has agreed to do a pick-up at a seedy bar in the outskirts of Seattle. That should have been easy, earning her easy money. Instead, the computer disc that is slipped into her pocket results in the death of her contact sending warning signals to Allie's brain and shivers up her spine.

When she seeks brief refuge with an old friend and computer expert, he, too, is slain. Allie has apparently stumbled onto evidence concerning a 30-year-old CIA cover-up in Vietnam. She is soon running for her life, having no one to trust and, actually, nowhere to go.

Suspense mounts as she races through the shadowy side of American life and doesn't let up until the final startling page.

With experience as a forklift driver, a furniture-mover, a grape-picker and a bartender among other occupations, one cannot help but wonder where Jenny Siler learned to write, but no matter. Write she does! Her pictures of Vietnam War experiences elicit horrified shudders while her sometimes touching reminiscences about a father-daughter relationship resonate.

With the skill of an experienced master of the thriller genre, Ms. Siler constructs a commendable plot with enough ups and downs to make Easy Money a mesmerizing page-turner. She is equally deft at drawing scenes of the natural world, whether it be a muggy evening on Key West or the vast emptiness of Montana: "You begin to wonder if the retreat of the great inland sea really left mussel shells in the country so named. You can imagine fields of kelp where the wind now stirs wheat. Low clouds glide above you like pods of prehistoric whales."

Jenny Siler is an author to watch - watch and eagerly wait for what will come next.