Freight by Ryan Lowell

Published by  ‎ Little, Brown and Company on August 11, 2026

Freight is a heist novel, but the heist comes late in the story. Most of its pages tell a story of truckers and dispatchers and the miserable lives they lead. Given the hapless nature of the characters, the reader expects the heist to go sideways. In that regard, the reader will not be disappointed.

The novel has an ensemble cast. One of the most sympathetic characters, Curtis, works as a third shift dispatcher at a Bangor trucking company. He hates his job and has a strained relationship with his wife Rachel. From a sense of duty, Curtis occasionally drops by to see his high school friend Adam, a recovering (or not) addict who lives in a room above his parents’ garage. Talking about a mutual friend, Curtis tells Adam that people from high school never turn out as you’d expect, but Curtis is really talking about Adam and maybe himself.

Billy and Jimmy are truck drivers. They concoct a plan to steal the tractor and trailer driven by Theo after he picks up a load from a pharmaceutical company in Canada. Billy likes to brag about his sexual exploits and seems uncertain about Jimmy when he shows little interest in scoring with one of the two women they meet in a motel bar. Billy’s plan to steal the truck assures that Jimmy takes the greater risk.

Theo prefers his own company to time spent with others, including his wife. Theo has been shagging Sarah on the side and makes the mistake of inviting her to accompany him on his trip to Canada. Theo worries that his wife might have left him when all his credit cards stop working.

Theo doesn’t want to interact with Sarah unless they’re having sex, an attitude that will not serve him well as the story nears its climax. Sarah drifts from man to man and is more interested in pills than stability, but — like Curtis — she is a reasonably nice person.

Stephanie works as a clerk at a convenience store, where she found a job for Sarah. Stephanie knows that Sarah “had some weird thing going on with a trucker” but doesn’t know the details. When Sarah misses work for a few days without explanation, Stephanie is more concerned than anyone else, including Sarah’s alcoholic mother.

There’s a touch of Hemingway in Ryan Lowell’s no-frills writing style. Lowell also shares with Hemingway an affinity for emotionally isolated characters, loners who feel a deep sense of alienation from society. His focus on long-haul truckers who choose be alone for days at a time gives him ample opportunity to explore that theme.

The story is built on a wealth of detail about the interaction of truckers and dispatchers, including the tension between dispatchers who regard themselves as intellectually superior to truckers and truckers who feel that dispatchers don’t understand their concerns. Lowell opens a window into that world that feels authentic.

The heist is played more for comedy than drama, a choice that works well in the context of the story. The characters feel real and if none of them are wholly likeable, Lowell makes it easy to understand them and to empathize with those who deserve empathy. No character escapes the story unscathed, although it appears that one of them might have found a path to a better life until the story twists in its final pages. I recommend Freight as an enjoyable novel with a rich mix of comedy and drama that is driven by memorable characters.

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The Tailor by Tim Sullivan

Published by Atlantic Crime on August 11, 2026

The DS George Cross books are among the most entertaining police detective novels in current crime literature. Reading them in order would help readers understand the evolution of George’s relationships with his family and co-workers, but each book in the series has a self-contained plot, so readers can easily enjoy The Tailor without reading the earlier novels.

The story begins with the murder on a train of William Titcomb, a tailor who makes bespoke suits in Bristol. Titcomb’s body is found with a freezer bag over his head, but the killer apparently cut his throat after Titcomb managed to poke a hole in the bag with his pen.

To get to the bottom of the crime, George interviews Titcomb’s wife Min and his sister Gwen, who worked alongside Titcomb in his shop. Min is employed by a super-secret business that is developing batteries. When the corpse of an employee of the battery business is found with a freezer bag over his head, George suspects the police were wrong to chalk up the death as a suicide.

George also discovers that Titcomb was Toby Fletcher’s tailor. George met Fletcher (who George knows to be a British spy) in connection with an earlier investigation. He learns that Fletcher introduced Min to Titcomb in college. Fletcher’s role in the intrigue only becomes clear at the story’s end.

Titcomb maintained a workshop in China where his less expensive suits were assembled. He was taking the train to Heathrow to catch a flight to Dubai, where he planned to deliver two suits to customers of the firm before moving on to the workshop in China. Titcomb’s suitcase and suit carriers were stolen from the train (and the lining torn from the suit Titcomb was wearing), leading George to surmise that the killer was searching for something that Titcomb was transporting.

The murder mystery takes on elements of a spy novel when certain characters, including a Chinese apprentice in Titcomb’s shop and a couple of South Korean killers, raise George’s suspicions. George pulls at the threads of mystery until concocted stories unravel and he discovers the motivation for Titcomb’s murder.

Along the way, George manages to get himself abducted, a bit more action than he desires. George bicycles to work every day but he is far from an action hero. These books rely on old fashioned deduction rather than fistfights and shootouts to hold a reader’s interest. George is not someone who is likely to escape from armed captors unless he bores them to death as he analyzes their criminal motives and suggests improvements in the meals they bring him.

Like his father (a retired aeronautics engineer), George likes to know how things work, a trait that drove him to learn the intricacies of the drycleaning business in The Patient and bicycle racing in The Cyclist. George devotes the same obsessive interest to the process of making a bespoke suit in The Tailor. His former partner and new superior DI Ottey has learned that this is “all part of his oblique information-gathering process.”

Lectures about how things work can become tedious (for example, the whaling industry in Moby-Dick or glove manufacturing in American Pastoral), but Tim Sullivan manages to pique my interest in subjects without providing so much detail that I grow bored with them. And fortunately for the plot, Cross always learns something that helps him solve the crime.

Sullivan always adds human interest to his stories by exploring Cross’ relationship with his aging parents. In The Tailor, Cross’ father Raymond can no longer tolerate living with Cross’ mother and moves in with Cross, much to Cross’ horror. A suitable solution to Raymond’s impulsive behavior satisfies everyone except Raymond, but he’s placated by an arrangement that allows him to restore his model train set to a spare bedroom.

As is customary in DS Cross novels, the story moves quickly and the plot — while less complex than most entries in the series — has a few surprising twists. At this point, I enjoy the novels as much for George’s autism and his struggles to understand the importance of good manners as the mysteries that George solves. The other novels in the series have stronger plots and more cunning mysteries, but The Tailor delivers enough of George’s amusing peccadillos to make me glad I didn’t miss it.

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Under the Falls by Richard Russo

Published by  Knopf by August 11, 2026

Under the Falls is a novel of guilt. Tyler Sinclair feels guilty because he abruptly left town after shagging his best friend’s girlfriend, abandoning them both. The best friend, now a small-town police chief, feels guilty about looking the other way as his wife commits crimes. Despite their guilt, Tyler is fundamentally a decent person, while the chief doesn’t seem like a bad guy if you don’t hold his criminal behavior against him. While the chief lacks the moral courage to make ethical choices, he has a moral compass that tells him the difference between right and wrong. The guilt that accompanies a lack of courage is the theme that drives the story.

Tyler left Stone Mountain, his hometown in upstate New York, when he was eighteen. He admits that he left without saying goodbye to his friends because he was afraid they would talk him out of leaving. He took only his guitar with him.

Now Tyler is a celebrity living in Nashville. He is the lead singer in the band Stone Mountain. He co-writes songs with Beth, a band member who might love him but might also want to leave the band to be with Jason, the band’s manager.

Although Tyler hoped never to return to his birthplace, Jason booked Stone Mountain to perform at a benefit concert for Tyler’s childhood friend Tim “Doc” Dockery. Doc may or may not blame Tyler for the paralysis he suffered. While Tyler saved Doc from drowning, he also contributed to the accident that caused Doc’s disability.

Curt, Tyler’s best friend in childhood (they pinky swore to be BFFs), is now Stone Mountain’s chief of police. Curt and Freddie, the girlfriend Tyler shagged, are now married and have a son. Freddie has never confessed her relationship with Tyler to Curt. Tyler is afraid that he might see them both during his homecoming and doesn’t know how to handle his shame. Curt’s son, however, is a big fan of Stone Mountain and has a strong desire to meet Tyler — until he doesn’t.

Doc warns Tyler that some residents of Stone Mountain resent him for becoming a success or for writing songs about them without compensating them for the inspiration they provided. The warning proves to be prophetic, as the concert does not go well.

After the concert, a driver runs Tyler off the road, killing two people in his limo. Tyler survives but has fuzzy memories of the accident. Curt is reluctant to investigate for fear of what he might learn. Curt’s “star officer” Deb begins to suspect the truth, but she struggles with the divide between her loyalty to Curt and the rumors she hears about Freddie’s crimes.

The perpetrator of Tyler’s hit-and-run comes as no surprise. The resolution of each story element — Tyler’s relationships with Curt and Freddie and Beth, Deb’s resolution of her anxiety about her job, the reason Tyler’s limo was forced off the road, Curt's unwillingness to confront the truth — are predictable, and that predictability robs the story of its tension. The various endings all struck me as a bit too neat.

At the same time, Under the Falls maintains a steady pace and builds to an exciting moment. Each element resolves in a way that is calculated to please readers, but the resolutions find a careful balance between artificial sweetness and depressing hopelessness. The struggle with guilt and courage assures that key characters have a reasonable amount of depth. On balance, the novel’s strengths outweigh its shortcomings.

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The Blue Flame by George Pelecanos

Published by Grand Central Publishing/Cardinal on August 4, 2026

The Blue Flame is an old-fashioned private detective story. The detective, Derek Strange, appeared in four novels (the D.C. Quartet) between 2001 and 2004, when he was partnered with Terry Quinn. Strange starred in another novel published in 2012. George Pelecanos has gifted crime fiction fans with other series, standalone novels, and screenplays for many years. While he’s been less prolific recently, his fans can be happy he brought back Strange in a novel that has the feel of classic PI fiction.

Strange was in his 40s when his actions were chronicled in the D.C. Quartet. At the beginning of The Blue Flame, Pelecanos tells us that he’s had his storefront office in D.C. for fifty years. He’s mentoring and renting space to a young female detective, Graciella “Grace” Lopez. Grace is a feisty, independent woman who isn’t a business partner and has no desire to become one.

Strange was a cop for a brief time before he became a PI. Near end of The Blue Flame, a police detective tells him, “Once you wear the uniform, the blue flame never goes out.” Hence the title. In the tradition of private detective fiction, however, Strange is both an ally and adversary of the police. He ignores their warnings not to investigate a case and he is selective about sharing the discoveries he makes. His loyalty is to his client and his allegience is to the truth.

Strange has fallen on hard times: “business was off; these days, he was barely getting by.” He therefore agrees to accept Billy Lake’s invitation to conduct an investigation in a murder case, despite his sense that Lake is ethically challenged. Lake’s client, a marijuana dealer named Antone Anthony, is charged with killing Nigel Walker.

The key witness is Cynthia Barnes, who told the police that she spent the afternoon in bed with Walker, then drove him to his car (which Walker parked at a distance from Walker’s home so her father wouldn’t see it). Walker told Barnes that he was going to meet Anthony at the apartment of Ricardo Lennox.

After Barnes drove away, someone shot Walker as he was sitting in his car. Barnes was a lifelong friend of both Walker and Anthony. She didn’t believe that Anthony would kill Walker, but she told the police that Anthony and Walker were “beefing over an unpaid debt.” All this would seem pretty insubstantial but for the murder weapon being found in Walker’s apartment when the police searched it for drugs.

With that setup, Strange conducts a traditional gumshoe investigation. He meets Barnes’ angry father when he tries to interview her. With the help of his office mate, he follows Barnes to a hotel and discovers that she and her friend are being pimped to businessmen who attend conventions. The investigation becomes more complicated after another murder occurs. Strange helps the police solve two murders while managing to avoid his own arrest for obstructing justice.

I admired The Blue Flame for it throwback view of private investigators who aren’t action heroes. The story doesn’t need shootouts or fistfights to maintain a steady pace. The characters have interesting takes on life; the contrast between the worldviews of Strange and Lopez is particularly sharp. I enjoyed Strange’s depiction of two creeps who are part of “the manosphere. They had got there by listening to bro podcasts and both had taken the red pill. Masculinity was the only flag they worshipped, and misogyny was their code.” Strange hasn’t gotten so old that he’s unaware of the direction in which younger men have traveled.

Strange worries about the blurry line between right and wrong. He gets information out of Barnes while buying her drinks. He can see that she has a drinking problem and doesn’t try to get her drunk but takes advantage of the alcohol loosening her tongue as he questions her. A good many detectives in modern fiction are either self-righteous or don’t care at all about ethical conduct. I enjoyed spending time with one who appreciates the difficulty of drawing lines in a morally muddy world.

False leads and loose ends are all tied up by the story’s end. The plot, while not particularly surprising, does not overreach. That’s another pleasant surprise in a time when crime fiction plots are often shockingly implausible. While The Blue Fame isn’t Pelecanos' finest work, it is an entertaining book that should appeal to fans of traditional private detective fiction.

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Etna by Paul Yoon

Published by Scribner on August 4, 2026

The phrase “dogs of war” originates in Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser and is the title of an excellent Fredrick Forsythe thriller, but dogs are not characters in either the play or the novel. Etna is a true “dogs of war” story. It tells the story of war and its aftermath from a dog’s perspective.

The war is waged for four years in an unidentified country, presumably South Korea. American and European soldiers are among the combatants who have arrived to defend the country from an unidentified enemy. Given the use of drones and cellphones, this is a modern war, not a story from the past.

A doctor named Soojin belongs to the army of the country where the novel takes place. She has the ability to communicate with dogs. The Americans have hired her to identify and train dogs who can help with the war. On a farm, she finds a twelve-month old mixed-breed shepherd. She names him Etna, after a volcano, although a bird later tells Etna that in Greek his name means “to burn.”

The story is told from Etna’s point of view. Etna explains that animals communicate with each other silently (“it was like dark shapes appeared and lived in a space between our eyes, shapes we could translate”), but Etna feels Soojin’s words “more physically, and around me: it was like the air was pressing against my ears, and then a small door opened in my head into a corner I had never been inside before.” I’ve had dogs who seemed to understand everything I say (and some who have understood nothing, unless they were feigning ignorance), but I envy Soojin’s ability to understand their language.

Soojin named a second dog Fuji. She urges Etna and Fuji to find her when the war is over so they can move to Italy and live in peace.

The army trains the dogs to attack the enemy, going for the throat when necessary. They are also tasked with sniffing out IEDs and buried mines.

The war lasts four years. The soldier who handles Etna takes good care of him but doesn’t want to keep him when the war ends. “I wasn’t his dog. When he saw me, he saw the dog he had worked with and fought alongside and lost.” Before the war is over, however, the soldier proves his love of Etna.

Etna relates some of his wartime adventures, but most of the story takes place after the war ends. Etna has experienced the same trauma that human soldiers endure. “I had seen mountains burn. I had seen lakes burn and boulders burn and airplanes burn and tanks burn and animals burn and humans burn and bones burn. And when there was nothing left to burn, there was still the sound of it. I would always remember the sound of the burning.” Humans develop PTSD and I suppose there is no reason to think that dogs react to trauma any differently.

For much of his time after the war, Etna is on his own, trying to get back to the farm where he was born. The war has turned the country into a wasteland and left humans in desperate circumstances. Some humans are still fighting. Some want to eat him. He travels to a city and into the mountains during his quest to return to the coastal farm of his puppyhood.

Etna meets a couple of friendly dogs along the way. A dog named Semeru who shares his dreams of a well becomes his companion. Sometimes they play tug with an old rope because, well, they’re dogs. Pausing to play in the midst of turmoil is one of the many things I love about this novel.

For good reason, Etna is wary of humans, but he encounters another doctor, a kindly man who treats his wounds and helps him with part of his journey. Will Etna reunite with Soojin? That question provides the story with some of its drama.

The importance to dogs of being part of a pack is the novel’s underlying theme. It serves as a reminder of the importance to humans of community and relationships, or at least a sense of belonging. At the same time, Etna and Semeru make clear that being part of a pack doesn’t require us to attack everyone outside the pack or to regard others as outsiders. Etna defends himself and protects his humans as necessary but never condemns other humans or animals (even donkeys) simply because they are different.

Near the story’s end, a bird reminds Etna of the importance of having friends, even if the friends are not like us. If we lose our pack, the bird counsels, we need to find another. It is important not to be alone.

Maybe Etna learns that you can’t go home again. If Etna’s home still exists, it won’t exist as he remembers it. The smells will be unfamiliar. Change is difficult for humans and dogs alike, but the time may come to make a new home, to form or join a new pack. We endure because there is always hope that life will get better. Sometimes it does.

If you can’t abide sadness, don’t read Etna. Paul Yoon doesn’t shy away from tragic moments. He nevertheless balances them with moments of grace. The story is written with deceptive simplicity that almost masks its elegance. Lovers of dogs and literature should find Etna to be a memorable experience.

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