With elegant prose and an artist's eye for detail, Mayo may just have written one of the best books ever about Baja California. Mayo (Sky over El Nido, which won a Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction) divides her time between Mexico City and the United States, and it's her Mexican residency and employment that give her Baja explorations an extra edge. This Mexican California, a 1000-mile-long peninsula, presents a bewildering combination of opposites. The landscape can be fierce desert or productive farmland. Baja's citizens are often desperately poor or revoltingly rich. The land attracts both opportunists and expatriates; the Jesuits arrived early on and were removed by interdict from their own church. From south to north, Mayo explores Baja's tourist -crowded Cabo San Lucas and its notorious border city, Tijuana. She travels by mule to view ancient petroglyphs and explores the ruins of long-abandoned missions. One might say she experiences to the fullest all Baja has to offer. Still, the mysterious allure of Baja California is never diminished; it remains a destination that conjures up a frisson of danger and the siren call of unexplored spaces. Highly recommended for travel collections of large public and academic libraries.