Vaunce County Drug Tales: Southerns

By Leonnard Menifee

Moonshiners and bootleggers in eastern Kentucky discovered a second living, beyond the soil and the coal mines, during and after America's Prohibition. Growing cannabis used to be a misdemeanor in Kentucky. A stray patch out back didn't fetch attention in the holler ... or at the local courthouse. But by the 1980s, the War on Drugs had turned an odd "patch of kill" into a felony. As the risks rose, so did the price. So the good ol' boys and girls who once slung liquor among networks of hidden cabins found something better to supplement what little they earned from the soil and the mines.

Bart Southern and Duane Varnum drive around Vaunce County in Duane's mandarin pickup, meeting friends at obscure roadway cutoffs to drink and do drugs together, until one day they get the opportunity to sell those drugs. Their source is Ambrose Hood, "Big Boy," the heir to a coal fortune, and his sister Beatrix-Lee. The Hoods are expanding their drug empire despite the War, but a new state cop called Tarnation Quagg comes to town riding helicopters set to destroy the drug wealth they're heaping up. Not only that - but one of their local dealers rapes Bart's younger sister Annie, creating dissension in the ranks that Big Boy and Bea cannot abide. Eventually these separate strands get tangled up; and out of nowhere another one unspools - a spiritual bond between the Hoods' recondite hitman, vicious, blood-soaked Terry Little and Annie Southern.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1733950605
• ISBN13: 9781733950602
• Release Date: July 2019
• Publisher: Benjamin Patrick Williams
• Length: 362 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.8"