On the Road

A phone rings before dawn. A mother answers. What she hears in that voice-the urgency, the desperation, the thing it isn't saying-tells her everything she needs to know. In On the Road, a single night unravels in five tightly coiled chapters across the boroughs of New York City and the dark highways of New England. Henry Adler drives his eighteen-wheeler up the coast as he always does, unaware that a phone call has already been made and answered on his behalf.
His mother, Eileen, stands in her dark hallway with the receiver in her hand and makes a decision in seconds that will change the course of the night-and of Henry's life. Seven miles away, a young woman named Melissa Crane lies on the cold lawn of her parents' home in a yellow sweater she paid six dollars for. The man who put her there is hiding in an attic in Queens, making plans with cold precision and no remorse.
He needs a truck. He needs a driver. He needs one person to say yes. Eileen says no. On the Road is a lean, driving thriller about the weight of a lie told for love, the lethal narrowness of obsession, and what it costs-and saves-to protect the people you can't stop worrying about. Written in close, visceral prose that shows every breath and heartbeat, it is a story about mothers and sons, about guilt carried alone in the dark, and about the thin margin between the life you keep and the one you almost lose.