Lullaby Road by James Anderson

The desert is a lonely place if you don't have company.  Some people like it that way.

Ben drives the desert route every day.   He picks up supplies and delivers them to the homes and businesses.  In the winter, the road is deadly.  No one will else will go there.  He does it because it pays and he knows the road and it nuances.  He never expected to get stuck with a child at the local gas station.  The proprietor tells him he has a present at pump eight.  He finds a very small child with a note on it.  It's from Pedro telling him to keep his son safe.  The gas station door is locked, it's snowing and he doesn't have much choice.  He wasn't going to take the dog, too, but if he likes his hands he's going to have to...

Crown Publishing and Net Galley let me read this book for review (thank you).  It will be published January 16th.

I live in the desert, too, and sometimes the road looks like it never ends.  The towns are small and not too close to each other.  There are abandoned buildings, dead animals with buzzards on them, and ghosts out there.  I could relate to this road that Ben travels on.  Somehow, he never manages to stay out of trouble.  He's still having problems at this point in his life.  

The little boy turns out to be a little girl.  She doesn't speak.  He leaves her with a woman who can care for her (along with the baby he was forced to babysit) and heads back to the service station.  Carlos isn't there.  Pedro isn't there.  He doesn't have time to look for them.

All the characters in this book are eccentric.  They're odd, have their quirks, and they listen to a different drummer.  Those folks were fine even if they were a bit hard to deal with.  But when Ben finds out that the out-of-the-way service station was stealing tires and then moved to other endeavors, he's angry.

This is a dark tale about just how awful the world can be.  Sometimes folks have to have a place to hide from the world.  And sometimes bad people travel through there, too.