Thrift Shop Book Covers: "The Mexico Run"

The Mexico Run was a paperback original published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1974, which is the very edition that caught my eye. The cover features a racing car—Jaguar, it appears—with a starred bullet hole in the windshield, billowing dust in its wake, a stone church in the background, and another car in pursuit. It is beautifully 1970’s Gold Medal. The artist: Unknown (to me).

The opening sentence:

“I picked up the XKE in San Francisco. It cost me twenty-six hundred dollars, and I bought it from an instructor at the University over at Berkley, who I figured had probably used it mostly for girl-bait on weekend trips down to the Monterey Peninsula.”