Suspenseful and tightly plotted, Easy Money is one wild cross-country ride. What separates this thriller from the pack, however, is its smart, sympathetic cast of characters. Allie is an intensely likable and believable heroine; she comes by her street smarts in the family way, having grown up with a drug-smuggling father who taught her how to fight, shoot, and hide from the law. Allie's on the run from the police as well as the men who are after the disk, and she's also rebounding from "one of the world's greatest love affairs with cocaine." But what frightens her most is the kind of normal life she's never had: "Of all the shit I have to deal with when I'm working--bungled connections, bad packages, cops--the most difficult thing for me is the American family."

Debut novelist Jenny Siler shows extraordinary promise. Throughout Easy Money her writing is never less than artful, and often has a kind of edgy poetry all its own: "How to explain the bloom against the throat, the ragged scrim that separates violence from longing, longing from love?" Character development and fancy-pants prose aside, there's always the steadily rising body count and the loving descriptions of weaponry to remind you: Allie Kerry is one tough cookie, and this is, unmistakably, a high-octane thriller--albeit one as concerned with memory and identity as with bad guys and guns. --Mary Park