Tom "T" Walker, a 57-year-old businessman, knows better than to pick up a beautiful young woman hitchhiking with her dangerous-looking boyfriend, but he stops for them anyway. He’s been living alone, his life ruinously off course, in such utter isolation from everyone he has ever loved that he welcomes the company and the excitement. But as T finds himself pulled into the chaos of their world in a way he will barely survive, he comes to see his personal history and experiences in an altered and troubling light.
Author Edward Falco brings stunning emotional depth and tense action to unforgettable characters as they journey through the mundane world to places where illusions fail and they must face their hidden selves.
Just a fun, breezy read — a beach read, if you will. A 50-something picking up a couple of dubious hitchhikers on the lam in upstate NY from drug dealers in the South stretches the suspension of disbelief when our wealthy protagonist sort-of-doesn't hook-up with the hot 23-year-old girl. I knew it wasn't Philip Roth but it kept me interested enough to see it through.
Oh yeah, the protagonist is a Syracuse grad and the story treads some familiar ground, probably why this advance copy ended up on my desk eight years ago.
Ehhh... Not feeling this story about a late middle-aged man who has a faux love affair with a girl a third his age that he picks up hitchhiking and the reckless weekend he spends with her and her drug-dealing former boyfriend. Comes across to me as a lot of wishful thinking mixed with forced ruminations regarding life, family, and perspective. The prose is clean and direct. But the story leaves me cold.
This is a fun, smart, literary thriller. It starts with a premise so simple it feels like a cliche-- man picks up hitchhikers, trouble ensues-- but Falco is clever enough to anticipate and avoid the tropes and pitfalls that a lesser author might fall prey to. It's a quick read, but a very engaging one.
Pretty verbose treatment of what could have been a more suspenseful story. I was bored by the end and skipped over the more cerebral passages, looking for some action.