The Delivery

Head-knocking courier Mercury Carter gets tangled in overlapping criminal conspiracies in Welsh-Huggins’s solid sequel to The Mailman. Carter, a former U.S. Postal Service cop, now makes a living delivering sensitive goods. The novel opens on a delivery run to Rhode Island, when he stops to help a woman who’s been in a car accident. After an armed man threatens the woman, Carter chases him off, then continues on his way, only to discover that the woman slipped him an envelope containing a ring and a business card for a Pawtucket banker. The ring, Carter learns, belonged to Terri Watkins, a missing woman with a drug habit and a history of prostitution. After assuring Watkins’s parents that he’ll help find her, Carter discovers that her pimp has been drugging clients with fentanyl, and a few of them have died. One victim is a key figure in a massive data theft scam engineered by a sleazy, money-hungry New England couple. Carter’s tenacity and physical durability help support Welsh-Huggins’s propulsive set pieces. Occasionally, though, the proceedings get bogged down by needless plot contortions. Still, fans of the first book will find this diverting enough. Agent: Victoria Skurnick, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (Mar.)