Former dispatcher of 13 years takes a stab at writing novel about dark world of truckers

A former trucking dispatcher of 13 years has published a novel about the dark world of being a trucker. 

Freight by Ryan Lowell was published on August 11th, 2026 and features a series of characters involved in an attempt at a freight heist along the Canadian border. 

“I’ve been working in trucking — not as a driver, but as dispatcher and operations manager — for over a decade, so I’m very familiar with the industry, the characters and the dynamics in play,” Lowell said in an interview about the book with the Portland Press Herald.

“And truck drivers are great storytellers — they love to talk about the places they’ve been and the crazy things they’ve seen. I’d been writing short fiction all along, and a few years ago I read an article about a tractor-trailer heist that happened when the driver was inside a truck stop having lunch, and I thought, there’s a great idea for a novel.”

The book publisher website describes the book as follows: “As a lone semi-truck makes its snowy way to the US-Canadian border, a series of vivid characters are inexorably drawn into a desperate, comedic, and murderous scheme to steal its precious cargo.”

Lowell lives in South Portland, Maine with his wife and two sons.