Freight

Lowell, Ryan Paperback, 224 pages As a lone semi-truck makes its snowy way to the US-Canadian border, a series of vivid characters are inexorably drawn into a desperate, comedic, and murderous scheme to steal its precious cargo. Curtis, a newly hired dispatcher with a newly pregnant wife at home, holds a scrap of paper that identifies a semi-truck trailer that shouldn't exist. Billy Trask is a weathered and charismatic sociopath, who thinks nothing of quietly killing whomever may come in his way, and carefully guards the coordinates for a truck loaded with $10 million dollars-worth of Canadian pharmaceuticals. Jimmy, Theo, and Sarah are the not-so-innocent locals poised to stand in Billy's way, none more so than Sarah, a local party girl with the heart and will of a colossus, and who will leave her own trail of mayhem and carnage in her 75-mile-per-hour wake. In the rough-and-tumble tradition of Dennis Lehane, S.A. Cosby, and classic American noir, Freight is a thrill-ride view of the world of labor, life and love--a searing portrait of men at work and also at their worst.