The Highway Diner

Mark Paul Smith

Summary

Twenty-year-old Murray is an aspiring artist who is helping her mother run a struggling truck plaza in Indiana when she falls in love with Ben, a truck driver on hiatus from Stanford University. A shooting at the plaza draws national attention as drivers rally to support and reopen the truck stop. Murray and Ben galvanize "Trucker Nation" into a campaign to stop the hatred poisoning the country. They encourage people to embrace the diversity that keeps the supply chain moving.

The victim of the shooting is the childhood buddy of a psychologically damaged war veteran who hates the federal government and the Teamsters' Union. He calls himself The Commander and sees the Highway Diner as profiting from the death of his friend. He conducts a campaign of intimidation from his heavily armed compound in rural Michigan. When death threats, billboard campaigns, and kidnapping fail, he bombs the plaza. Ben is killed.

Murray's grief and trauma overwhelm her once The Commander is finally defeated. She enrolls in art school at The University of Chicago, but all she can do is cry when she stands in front of her easel. With the help of friends, Murray realizes that being able to paint again is not the final goal of grieving. It is the creative process that helps her wade through the sadness.

Available since: 06/25/2024.

Print length: 380 pages.

Contemporary Fiction

Other books that might interest you

Hogg

Samuel R. Delany

The narrator of Hogg is a Huck Finn–like youngster caught in society’s most sinister seams—but unlike Huck, he passes no moral judgments on the violence he takes part in . . .Hogg is the story of a man—a depraved trucker named Franklin Hargus, whom the people he works for call Hogg—and of the nameless boy who tells the story of three days of unspeakable sexual violence and devastation, which, together, they initiate in a small seaside American city in the middle of the last century. Hogg is a towering brute who makes his living as a rapist for hire. By the end of a series of vicious attacks, kidnappings, and mass murders, the reader will wonder who is more corrupt: the man or the boy.   Samuel R. Delany completed his first draft of Hogg within a day, if not within hours, of the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City and revised it over the next four years, though it was not released until 1995.

Show book

Gangbanged by dogs 6-pack

Penelope Liksit

6 erotic tales that involve women taking on a whole load of dogs all at once!
 
These are just the kind of hot stories that you know you can't resist!

Show book