War on Drugs

Waylon Choy, one of many journalists to lose their jobs as newspapers everywhere shrink, finds a woman dead from a drug overdose while on his morning jog through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Nobody knows her real name or where she came from. Choy, who has been struggling to write a novel while also starting a freelance writing business, chases down leads to uncover the story about one among tens of thousands who die every year in North America’s opioid epidemic. On the same day he promises to discover who the dead streetwalker junkie was, a mysterious, powerful international businessman offers him a lucrative contract that makes Choy uncomfortable, but he cannot turn down his first paying customer, especially one who offers to save his father from an expensive addiction. In the second book of the FAKE NEWS mystery series, Choy grapples with the complicated ethics of earning a living as a freelancer. He prefers to focus on his search for the truth about a dead woman, but learns that agreeing to work for a powerful patron comes with numerous strings, perhaps chains, attached.