Ron Formisano Libros

Investigative reporter Clay "call me Thorne" Hawthorne takes on the multi-billion-dollar industry of human trafficking that steals for profit the freedom of millions of victims. In Kentucky arrests of restaurant and other business owners using forced labor in inhumane conditions are common. But Thorne wants to expose the bigger business of sex trafficking that coerces hundreds of women and girls into a modern form of slavery. His inquiries lead him into conflict with a racist motorcycle gang as he focuses on erotic massage parlors, over ten thousand in the U.S. and hundreds in Kentucky. Thorne discovers that voluntary and involuntary prostitution, from high-class escort services to local rings in small towns to the strings of massage parlors, is "hiding in plain sight." But exposing the extensive criminal networks that operate strings of parlors proves difficult and dangerous. He enlists the reluctant help of a former escort, a beautiful, mysterious woman with a past she wants to forget. Meanwhile, white nationalist militias and Nazis are recruiting in Kentucky and prompted by their deluded conspiracy theories, have targeted his newspaper, the Bluegrass Herald as an enemy of white supremacy.

"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."--Back cover