Monday, October 26, 2020

Another Excellent Novel from J. Todd Scott


Lost River
 is an outstanding novel from J. Todd Scott who has been a federal DEA agent for more than twenty years and who thus has had a front row seat watching the ravages of drug addiction and the toll it has taken on millions of Americans and on the country as a whole. This book, his fourth, is set in the dying community of Angel in eastern Kentucky.


The fictional town of Angel once thrived on the business of coal mining, and the substance most often abused there was moonshine whiskey. But after raping the land and leaving it devastated, the mining companies have moved on, taking the jobs with them, and leaving the town and its remaining inhabitants as badly bruised and damaged as the land itself.

Few of the people left in Angel have any sort of jobs at all, let alone anything that might be construed as meaningful or rewarding, and way too many of them have turned for comfort, first to opioids and then to heroin. A criminal clan controlled by a large family known as the Glassers now controls the local drug supply and much of the town itself. The local police force has been hopelessly corrupted, and in consequence, no one is about to challenge the Glassers and no one is able to deal with the destruction they've left in their wake.

As the book opens, a particularly potent and deadly heroin mix is working its way through the community, courtesy of the Glassers, and people are dying left and right. As this happens, Scott introduces the reader to a few of the characters still hanging on in Angel, including Dobie and Trey, the two young men who constitute what passes for the local ambulance service, and through their eyes, we get a gut-wrenching view of the toll that the drug epidemic is taking on the small community.

Suddenly, though, on a day when Dobie and Trey are racing from one call to the next, the word goes out that there's been a massacre at the Glasser family compound. Virtually all of the Glassers appear to have been slaughtered and this brings the DEA to Angel, in the person of Agent Casey Alexander, a woman with a past and scars of her own.

The story plays out over the span of twenty-four hours as Alexander and her partner attempt to make sense out of the developments at the Glasser compound while trying to sort through the tangled relationships of the people in Angel. The story is brilliantly written and populated with a cast of well-drawn and believable characters. The setting is very well done and as the tension builds through the second half of the book, it's almost impossible to put down.

This is not a story that's going to leave any reader in excellent spirits. It's an impossibly depressing tale, all the more so for the truth it exposes about the opioid crisis that is currently taking such a heavy toll, particularly in some parts of rural America. Still, for all the tragedy that inhabits this story, it's impossible to look away, and this is a book that will haunt readers for a long time after they've read the final pages.

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