One of the best novels I read last year was The Devil’s Redhead by Northern California author David Corbett. Just recently, he’s presented highbrow thriller fans another literate, emotional, and gritty nail biter entitled Do They Know I’m Running?, a novel that goes behind the demagogue-dominated debate about immigration into a complex, ambiguous, and suspenseful portrait of the treacherous world of human smuggling. It’s an exciting story that rings with more truth about this issue than anything coming out of most of today’s media.

Do They Know I’m Running? is also a worthy throwback to the novels of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, where the heroes are not unflappable (and too-often boring) James Bond Übermensch, but Ordinary Joes, drawn, shoved or tricked into extraordinary situations that awaken them to how things really are and force them to find out the right thing to do or die.

This tale’s ordinary man is an eighteen-year-old, Salvadoran-American named Roque Montalvo. Orphaned at birth, Roque dreams big guitar hero dreams while stuck in the cramped quarters of the trailer he shares with his Uncle Faustino, Aunt Lucha, and his brother Godo, a frontline Iraq War vet, mutilated and--like about every frontline veteran I’ve ever known--deeply fucked up by the experience.

These people have already lived through enough bad news in their lives when, one day, it comes knocking again: Uncle Faustino, an undocumented worker and the family’s only real breadwinner, has been nabbed by federal immigration agents and deported back to El Salvador.

Responding to this crisis, Roque’s cousin Happy Orantes, Faustino’s son and a small-bore criminal with big ideas, schemes to send callow Roque on a fool’s mission: Because Roque is the only family member with both full American citizenship and the youthful stamina required, he must journey all the way down to El Salvador and bring Uncle Faustino back across the U.S.-Mexican border.

Happy makes the usual promises that all will be simple and easy, but of course, he has more snakes up his sleeve than Roque realizes (a lot more, as revealed by Happy’s back room dealings with both Salvadoran gangsters and an FBI agent).  By the time Roque arrives in El Salvador, he finds two more passengers have been added to his smuggling manifest: an enigmatic Arab emigrant, named Samir, and a beautiful, talented but luckless nightclub singer, named Lupe who’s been reduced to just another product in the cartel’s brutal marketplace.

Like in all good stories, we’re taken on more than the surface journey: one, the hair-raising realistically drawn race through the obstacle course of human trafficking (as it’s now done south of the border); and the journey that Roque takes from boy to man, all the while hoping that both his body and soul survive the deadly trip.

Do they Know I’m Running? is an exciting read that’s written with a strong moral and political engagement that doesn’t feel overly preachy. It provides a gallery of excellent character portraits of the good and bad alike and shows the interplay between people’s  angry, often contradictory, minds and the hard world in which they live. This is especially true of Godo, the Iraq war vet who spins from cursing those who cheer on that war to an equal hatred of those who oppose it, while only barely aware of the nihilistic mire he’s sunk himself into.

Even though it provides a sympathetic portrait of undocumented workers, Do They Know I’m Running? tries hard to see all sides of this knotty debate, from Lattimore, the honest but cynical FBI agent, to those U.S. rural citizens who live along the U.S.-Mexican border while the consequences of brutal corrupt governments, bad policy born of well-meaning naïveté and confusion and self-serving racist and economic politics wash up at their doors.

David Corbett also just plain old writes beautifully in long lovely sentences that paint each character in granular detail, from the way they dress, through the weapons they carry and the music they listen to; and finally, to the ways some of them die and some of them live to fight on.

I came across only a couple of weak points along the way. The scene where Happy recruits Roque into his scheme takes place off the page, making this triggering action a little hard to swallow at first (though I quickly forgot about it once the main narrative got rolling). At the end, the novel shifts starkly into the minds of supporting characters who, while important, are not as central as the ones whom we’ve journeyed with most of the way. This makes for a rather frayed ending and made me wonder if maybe Corbett, anxious to deal justly with the issue, maybe stretched his otherwise excellent book’s broad fabric just a little too far.

Every now and then I entertain gloomy thoughts that the time of literate, sophisticated genre fiction by literate, engaged writers have passed. It’s so nice to be proven wrong. David Corbett again shows how genre fiction can do more than provide a cheap, easy rollercoaster ride. Do They Know I’m Running? deserves to make it across the border to future readers.

[Thomas Burchfield is a freelance editor who lives in Northern California. His novel Dragon’s Ark, a 21st Century Dracula tale, will be out this fall from Ambler House. He can be followed on Twitter, Facebook and also posts essays when he can at the Red Room Website for writers. His recent essay on Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch can be found at this zine.]