Jay Porter is an alcoholic and lost everything because of his lifestyle, including his wife and his young son. Now Jay has turned his life around. He owns his own business, clearing out homes of people who have passed away. Not the greatest job, but at least he can survive. Jay's other job is being a private investigator. Jay is not crazy about this job, because he never fails to get him in trouble.

At one of his AA meetings, he runs into a woman he knew in high school. Amy wants Jay to find her sister Emily, who has been missing for a couple of weeks. Amy, a drug addict, claims her sister checked herself into rehab but has since disappeared. Jay really doesn't want to get involved in this as the rehab facility is own by the people he hates most in this world, the Lombardi family.

Jay's brother, who is now dead had a hard drive that has information on the Lombardis. For five years, Jay has been searching for this hard drive. Now it seems that Emily also might have somehow been involved with this same family. Jay has been warned by Rupert, a detective on the case, to stay out of things, but Jay knows that somehow all of this is somehow connected to the death of his brother.

Joe Clifford's BROKEN GROUND was a thrilling suspense novel. One after the other, there were great mysteries as to who killed who and why. I can tell by the ending of this story that the next Jay Porter novel will continue where this one left off. Can't wait! It really is a sad world for drug addicts who give up everything to get the drug of their choice. Here's hoping that Jay Porter will find his happy ending.

Book Summary

At an AA meeting, handyman and part-time investigator Jay Porter meets a recovering addict who needs his help. In the midst of another grueling northern New Hampshire winter, Amy Lupus’ younger sister, Emily, has gone missing from the Coos County Center, the newly opened rehab run by Jay’s old nemeses, Adam and Michael Lombardi. As Jay begins looking into Emily’s disappearance, he finds that all who knew Emily swear that she’s never used drugs. She’s a straight shooter and an intern at a newspaper investigating the Center and the horrendous secret hidden in it―or beneath it.

When Jay learns of a “missing” hard drive, he is flung back to five years ago when his own junkie brother, Chris, found a hard drive belonging to Lombardi Construction. For years Jay assumed that the much-sought- after hard drive contained incriminating photos of Adam and Michael’s father, which contributed to Chris’ death. But now he believes that hard drive may have harbored a secret far more sinister, which the missing Lupus sister may have unwittingly discovered. The deeper Jay digs, the more poisoned the ground gets, and the two cases become one, yielding a toxic truth with local fallout―and far- reaching ramifications.