SOURCE: Reich, Allon. “World According to Luck.” New Statesman and Society 2, no. 60 (28 July 1989): 32.

In the following review, Reich concludes that neither the love story nor the mystery in Ford's The Ultimate Good Luck is satisfactorily resolved.

The Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, once despaired of the fate of his poor country situated “so far from God, and so near to the United States”. Geographically at least, this may be The Ultimate Bad Luck. In Richard Ford's novel [The Ultimate Good Luck], set in Mexico, while bungling American gringos are busy drug-trafficking or getting blown to raspberry ripple in a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream factory, a benign deity is notably absent. As Harry Quinn realises from the start, what you need to “come out with some skin left on” in Oaxaca—a city populated largely by soldiers and police and guerrillas and dead people, where life is cheap, and road names change...