ROUTE: Monroe, MI to Windsor, CT: 720 miles (690 loaded + 30 deadhead)
Monday May 4th, I started my day at 11:30am at our terminal in Canton, MI. Instead of taking an empty I took a loaded trailer to the shipper. I left there at 3:00pm and drove seven hours with a couple of short breaks to the Sheetz truck stop in Buckhorn, PA, that has easy parking and 24/7 food service. Driving Eastbound I caught the sunset on my side mirror. I shut it down for the night at 11:00pm and had a salad for dinner.
Tuesday May 5th, I started my day at 11:00am after doing the pre-trip. I drove five-and-half hours to the consignee and arrived at 4:30pm.
BOOK REVIEW: The Invite by Irina Shapiro (2026), THRILLER – RATING (*****)
Eight friends from college were to spend an all-paid weekend at a fancy lakeside house in upstate New York. Lexi. organized the event as a get-together catch-up since she had been traveling around the world for the past three years.
Two of them married a year ago and some of the others have been romantically involved with each other or wanted to be. Most are well off professionally and they all have very different careers; a nurse, a lawyer, a photographer, a school teacher and so forth. Many have hidden skeletons from their past that become common knowledge as the weekend progresses.
It’s Halloween and they start arriving to the house individually or in pairs but surprisingly the host is absent. Lexi texts that she’s caught in traffic and to start dinner without her. It wouldn’t be a party of a bunch of mid-twenty year olds without an over abundance of alcohol and recreational drugs.
The next morning Lexi still has not arrived and one of the seven in attendance on an early morning walk discovers a body floating in the lake. Who is it? Was it an accident or murder? If the latter, was the person killed by an intruder or is there a killer among them? Richard, the lawyer, fishes the body out of the lake and instructs someone to call the police. As the police investigation progresses it seems that each one has a motive to commit the murder. The local authorities of this small community doesn’t have the manpower or experience to handle a complicated homicide case. The FBI is called as there are other related factors that merit their presence.
Overall entertaining that had me guessing wrong due to well thought out twist-and-turns. A surprising and fitting ending based on New York’s judicial system.
