Soon cell phones will start ringing and the men will be calling and then the girls will be fighting for the shower and slathering themselves in body glitter and asking Michele for condoms, extra cash, a ride. And Chase is unemployed and trapped in the suite on the twenty-second floor of the Palace with a girl he just may be in love with even though there had always been a line between them. It was a line Chase drew for a reason. Two months ago, in the spring, crossing that line was unimaginable.

The Delivery Man is an exhilarating debut novel: a fast, frightening, and unflinching portrait of today's lost generation. It is a love story set against the surreal excess of Las Vegas--and the artificial suburbs, gated communities, and freeways that surround it--where broken lives come to seek new beginnings and casinos feed the lust of tourists and residents alike. Ultrasophisticated local kids grow up fast and burn out early.

After attending college in New York, Chase returns to Vegas and is drawn into the lucrative but dangerous world of a teenage call-girl service by his childhood friend Michele, a beautiful Salvadoran immigrant with whom he shares a tragic past. Over the course of one extraordinary summer they will confront the violence and emptiness at the heart of the city and their generation.

At once stark and electrically atmospheric, horrifying and hopeful, The Delivery Man offers both a visceral reading experience and a complex moral vision. It is a novel of our times that addresses the oldest questions we ask ourselves. Most of all, it is a shattering indictment of a society in which personal responsibility has been abandoned, lust is increasingly substituted for love, and innocence is an anachronism. It also marks the arrival of an astonishing new voice in American fiction.