Originally published in 1995 and subtitled The Run for el Norte, this unlikely romance follows an American expatriate and his Mexican girlfriend on a road trip with a former Marine.

Former journalist Danny Pastor has relaxed in Puerto Vallarta over the past year with María de la Luz Santos, a 22-year-old woman whom he'd first met as a cantina waitress.

One was an American Navy officer, and the other was a software engineer ready to sell his company's work on failure analysis to the Taiwanese government.

Back at their apartment, Danny and Luz met a man who identifies himself as "Peter Schumann" and needs to get north of the Rio Grande quickly.

When she met with them for the trip, Luz wore blue jeans and a shirt that read "Puerto Vallarta Squeeze" with two halves of a lime dripping down the center.

Schumann later revealed that he's really former Marine sniper turned mercenary Clayton Price; he was commissioned to kill the engineer, but he took his job personally when he shot the naval officer.

Danny heads back to Puerto Vallarta through Mazatlán, but he's arrested when the gun Price used in the double murder is found behind his apartment's toilet.

Despite the evidence being circumstantial, Danny serves seventeen months of a ten-year prison sentence before he's released with a one-way ticket to Laredo.

When Luz flashes back to her childhood in Ceylaya, a gringo photographer bearing a strong resemblance to Robert Kincaid from The Bridges of Madison County takes photos of her working in the fields and sends her a copy of one.

Adapted for the screen by Richard Alfieri, it was directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman, and starred Harvey Keitel, Scott Glenn, and Jonathan Brandis (in his last role before his death in 2003).