Barnaby Skye, the earthy deserter from the Royal Navy who has carved a career in the Rocky Mountains as a trapper, guide, and magnet for adventure, drifts south to Mexican territory with his Crow Indian wife, Many Quills Woman (or "Victoria," as he calls her), in this thirteenth and newest of the Skye chronicles.

At Bent's Fort on the Mexican frontier, the Skyes agree to help a mysterious Cheyenne woman, Standing Alone, locate her two children who were kidnapped by Ute Indians several years before and sold into bondage in Mexico. The mission, impossible, dangerous, and foolhardy to all Skye's friends, takes the three to Santa Fe and Taos and into a strange association with an eccentric, self-proclaimed Texas adventurer and filibuster, Colonel Childress, who agrees to help them for reasons no one can guess.

Childress has a wagon decorated with a Jolly Roger, an enormous Clydesdale horse, and a pet spider monkey named Shine, whose nimble talent for stealing food and performing for coins saves the lives of Skye and his party on several occasions.

But neither the colonel nor his simian can prevent the inevitable consequences of an uninvited foray into forbidden territory. The party is robbed and left naked in the desert by Apaches; Skye is taken prisoner and sentenced to hang; Childress seems to be a traitor but rescues Victoria and Standing Alone, and is determined to find Skye and free him from his captors.

The Deliverance is the thirteenth in a series of early American West frontier novels featuring Richard Wheeler's Barnaby Skye, the most beloved and enduring character in modern Western fiction.