NIGHT ROAD

A truck laden with suspicious and perhaps dangerous cargo is crossing from Canada to the U.S., and everyone on either side of the border wants a piece of the action.

Naturally, backwoods New Hampshire drug dealer Duncan Crowley, who, with his ex-con older brother, Cameron, has been charged with ensuring that the shipment arrives on schedule, has an interest in the truck. So does Francois Oullette, president of Quebec’s Iron Steeds biker gang, after his attempt to extract a pass-through fee from the Crowleys ends with the execution of the collectors, Oullette’s nephew and his driver. When Tanya Gibbs, a Homeland Security agent obsessed with avenging a friend who worked at the World Trade Center, gets wind of the shipment, she reaches out to Zach Morrow, who went to school with Duncan Crowley before he enlisted in the Coast Guard and earned a dishonorable discharge, to intercept the truck. Back on his home turf, Zach quickly insinuates himself into Duncan’s gang but finds himself more and more reluctant to betray his old schoolmate and his wife, Karen, who lost her virginity to Zach in high school. Meanwhile, since Tanya’s clearly gone rogue in dealing with Zach, Gordon Simpson, her boss at Homeland Security, reveals an interest in the shipment that doesn’t exactly coincide with hers. It strains belief that so many people (and there are others) would know about the most fraught Canadian delivery to the U.S. in the two nations’ histories. But the creator of disgraced government agent Lewis Cole (Fatal Harbor, 2014, etc.) juggles his warring factions so deftly that you may find yourself forgetting how unlikely the threatened apocalypse really is.

A bonus: just when you think you know exactly how this mishmash will turn out, DuBois throws in a pleasing final surprise that will make you forgive the soft-boiled ending.