LOST RIVER

In this thriller written by a federal agent, the Drug Enforcement Administration investigates a “firestorm of fatal ODs” in a small Kentucky town.

Special Agent Casey Alexander and her partner have been targeting the Glasser family “forever.” The Glassers control the drug trade in Angel, Kentucky, but one day, they are shotgunned to death in their home. The Angel PD finds, among other horrors, a woman with wildflower tattoos on her back and her head blown off, one arm extended trying to reach her unharmed baby. But “Little Paris” Glasser is still alive, and he's the worst of them, “five feet of the devil….And every fucking inch of him hell.” The agents need every bit of their steel-spike toughness to deal with this demon, who smokes a mix of crank and wasp killer out of a 60-watt light bulb and sells drugs in glassine bags with pictures of dancing skeletons and the label “DOA.” As the law closes in, the action never stops until the final bullet flies in the inevitable, explosive confrontation. Scott’s writing is as vivid as it can get, with stunning lines like “Dillon Mackey hits his first home run ever, just as his mama, Kara, drops dead in the bleachers.” A character named Renfro is “an absence of light…vacant, a hole in the world.” The f-bombs fly as well, which would merit no mention except that there are enough to fill up their own chapter, and they lose their effing impact after the first few hundred. So Alexander and her partner may stop Little Paris or not, but the drug crisis goes on. This grim, gritty novel captures the feeling of hopelessness that the opioid epidemic brings. As Alexander muses, “Sometimes stories just don’t have happy endings.” Such as this one.

Well-told but raw as an open wound and not for the squeamish.