South of the Border, Marlis Wesseler’s second novel, makes excellent use of a clever, deeply affecting plot twist. The story opens with 19-year-old Arlene (originally of Saskatoon) being roused from a deep sleep in her hotel room in Palenque, Mexico. Knocking at the door are two sheepish policemen, come to inform her of the death by snakebite of her best friend and travelling companion, Sheila.

Arlene experiences what she later refers to as “the titanic bewilderment” that accompanies a first encounter with loss. She herself is lost, unsure how to proceed – that is, until she learns that it was all a big mistake. It was another girl’s body they found in the jungle. Sheila is alive! Arlene feels relieved, exhausted, and somewhat cheated. She has become “aware of reality, the possible consequences of risk, and [can’t] undo the knowledge.”

Yet, as implausible as it might seem, Sheila’s resurrection is not so much the crux of the tale as its set-up. In a bold, if ghoulish, narrative move, Wesseler then has Arlene and Sheila agree to adopt the dead girl’s ashes and belongings and return them to her parents in Phoenix. This transforms the novel’s emotional timbre. Oblivious in the way of 19-year-olds adventuring abroad, the two girls refuse to cut their trip short. They divvy up the dead girl’s birth control pills with only a slight twinge of conscience, and spend days attempting to seduce a wannabe-Buddhist beach bum. The novel occasionally dips into obvious psychological exposition, but here the prose deftly captures the friends’ particular combination of innocence, bravado, and crass self-involvement.

The final section of the novel revisits Arlene, at 50, on vacation in Mexico with her husband and 14-year-old son. The incident in Palenque has become less a mysterious burden than a lens through which to view her life – its particular bereavements and fateful turns. By forgoing sensationalism for sense-making, Wesseler manages to wring meaning from what is essentially tabloid fodder. A sophisticated, plain-spoken novel, South of the Border is both honest and tentatively humane in its wisdom.