El Camino Del Rio

August 3, 1998
Border Patrol agent Dolph Martinez watches for illegal immigrants, dope smugglers and gun runners. The half-Anglo, half-Mexican Dolph often feels caught between his responsibility as a U.S. official and his sympathy for the poor Hispanics whom he must arrest or take back across the river. (El Camino del Rio is Texas Highway 170, which runs near the Rio Grande.) Dolph finds a smuggler shot to death and discovers in the man's hand a glass vial filled with blue liquid. Four years earlier, a mysterious nun called Sister Quinn found Dolph, shot in the stomach and lying near death in a canyon, and gave him a similar vial to hold as she dragged him to where he could get medical attention. Sister Quinn was frequently on the scene of border trouble. Her followers considered her saintly, but Dolph suspects her of complicity in the illegal border businesses of Vincent Fuentes, a wanted man on both sides of the river. Compounding his confusion, Dolph falls hard for Ariel Alves, a recently arrived resort manager who has a puzzling relationship with Sister Quinn. Sanderson presents Dolph as a fully dimensioned character, a credible combination of grit and grace in the face of troubling ambiguities in a moral borderland.