Rating: 3 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Short Story


Alex spends time driving the dark country roads as he visits his mother. His travels take him up Gallows Hill, an area that is known to be a burial ground for executed criminals, suicide victims, and witches and there have been many reports of ghosts. On one rainy night, Alex picks up a hitchhiker named Joe, but when Joe disappears from Alex’s car, Alex has no explanation.

With a little research, Alex finds out Joe’s story. Alex has finally met the man of his dreams, but there cannot possibly be a future for them as Joe is trapped in a tragic night that happened forty years ago.

I like a short story at times between longer books. However, one of the only things I need a short story to accomplish is for it to be a complete story. The Low Road, however, read as an introduction to a larger story.

The story is told through Alex, who hasn’t had much luck with men. His mother is trying to fix him up and he’s traveling home from her house one night as it starts to storm. Joe is there on the side of the road and accepts Alex’s offer of a ride and Joe is elated to get out of the rain. The men hit it off immediately, but then Joe simply vanishes from the car.

The rest of the story is Alex trying to figure out who Joe is. The writing was fine and it was an interesting story, but with only 45 pages, there was not a lot of time to pull this together. There was no time for a romance to develop between the men and really no time for any sort of relationship to be explored either. There is a tie-in to Joe’s past that was a good premise, but again, there was no time to explore it. The ending leaves us with the characters admitting that they will never know what really happened, which made the story further not work for me. I would consider reading a longer story from this author, but this short style was too underdeveloped for my tastes.