What would you do if you found a person dead from a drug overdose while you were out jogging in your neighbourhood? And nobody could tell you her real name or where she came from? If you are freelance journalist Waylon Choy, you use your decades of experience as a reporter to interview people and chase down leads to write the story of one of the tens of thousands of people who die every year in North America’s opioid epidemic. Choy, who has recently taken a substantial buyout from his long-time employer, the Vancouver Sun newspaper, and sold his house at the height of a historic real estate boom to move in with his father, finally feels financially secure enough to become a freelance journalist and write about whatever interests him. Or to take on clients willing to pay for his almost 25 years of experience at one of Canada’s most important daily newspapers, but only if the story interests him. On the same day he promises to discover who the dead junkie was, a powerful businessman offers him a lucrative contract that makes Choy uncomfortable, but it is hard to turn down his first paying customer, especially one who also offers to help his father out of financial jam. As Choy grapples with the complicated ethics of earning a living as a freelancer, he prefers to focus on his search for the dead woman but learns that agreeing to work for a powerful patron comes with numerous strings, perhaps chains, attached. War on Drugs is about the bigger forces that shape drug policy: politics, immense profits, corruption, racism, foreign affairs, entrenched, self-serving bureaucracies and violence. Just like war created a powerful military-industrial complex, the war on drugs created a police-prison complex that sucks billions of tax dollars into a destructive, racist, but profit-producing-for-some, system that fights any common-sense reform of its failed policies, says author Gary Engler. Praise for the FAKE NEWS series … bring(s) the Hammett/Chandler tradition up to date in the nightmarish orange glow of the Trump era, telling stories of murder and conspiracy that take into account the punishing realities of class, gender and racial oppression in our times. … The action is well plotted and propulsive, and readers who love the noir elements of the hard-boiled detective genre will find much to enjoy here. Tom Sandborn, Vancouver Sun