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Lexington Herald-Leader investigative reporter Clay Hawthorne has made enemies among Kentucky's power elite with hard-hitting exposes of corruption and self-dealing by public officials, corporate executives, and non-profit administrators. He calls himself and publishes as "Thorne." Powerful elites regard him as one in their backside.
But when his crusty editor Jack Creed assigns him to examine the epidemic of drug abuse and overdose deaths in the Eastern Kentucky mountains, his investigation provokes reactions beyond unpopularity in Lexington's elite circles and that could prove fatal. Thorne must make probing visits to a hotbed of trafficking and drug abuse in the small city of Hazard, in Perry County. The deeper he digs the more dangerous his quest.
In the 1990s Purdue Pharma flooded Appalachia with opioids creating an epidemic of abuse and deaths. Now it's an epidemic on steroids. A powerful criminal organization is trafficking even deadlier drugs: fentanyl, heroin, and poisonous admixtures of fentanyl and opioids. And it is ruthlessly eliminating competition to consolidate its control over small dealers.
Thorne's inquiries bring him into a romantic relationship and investigative partnership with Jean Jackson, a beautiful, first-rate anti-narcotics detective.
"Thorne's Hazards" traverses a landscape of the rolling hills of the Bluegrass and the jagged contours of hill country. Readers will encounter the fabric of Kentucky: horse farms and thoroughbred racing, "Kentucky Gold" (bourbon); the mountain-city divide, and Appalachia's poverty and social ills.
