Off Route

Naomi Cross drives for Lyft. Night shifts, mostly. The roads are emptier and the passengers talk less. She's a combat veteran with a Bronze Star, a prosthetic leg, and two years of sobriety she counts the way she counts everything - by the numbers, one day at a time. She picks up strangers and takes them where they need to go. She doesn't ask questions. She doesn't get involved. That's the deal.
Tonight, the deal breaks.
A ride request comes in from Seward Park. A woman in an expensive coat with a bag she won't let go of and hands that won't stop shaking. She gets in the backseat and starts watching the road behind them. She doesn't say much. She doesn't need to.
Then the drone drops from the sky.
The passenger's name is Celeste. Her husband is Vikram Rajan, the founder of a defense technology company that builds surveillance systems for the Pentagon. For three years, he has tracked her movements, monitored her sleep, and watched her through cameras she was told were for security. Tonight, she found the files that prove it. Tonight, she ran.
Now two women are in a car on the back roads of the Pacific Northwest, hunted by military drones, a private security team, and a man who can see anyone, anywhere, at any time. Their only advantage: the mountains, the dark, and a driver who knows what it feels like to be the thing on the screen.
Off Route is a literary thriller about surveillance as domestic violence, the distance between safety and freedom, and two strangers who choose each other's survival on the longest night of their lives.

Darryl Wayne Townsend Jr. is the author of seventeen books spanning literary fiction, thrillers, novellas, and nonfiction. His work lives in the spaces between people - the things they can't say, the things they won't say, and the things they say to the wrong person. His novels include Still Water, Rare Pull, Taylor, Glass Empire, and Heavy Load. His nonfiction includes The Catalog Mindset and Don't Blow the Bag. He is the founder of Polymath Portfolio Group LLC and hosts the podcast Wait a Minute, Bitch on Spotify. He lives in Seattle. He is not done.