Excerpt from Death in Mud Lick by Eric Eyre, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She squinted at the labels more closely, the fine print displaying an eleven-digit code, as well as the names of a pharmacy she had frequented dozens of times and a doctor she had known for years. Dr. Donald Kiser had worked at the Wellness Center and the hospital emergency room in Williamson, the Mingo County seat, a twenty-minute drive from her home in Kermit. But he had written Bull's prescription from his new office in Marietta, Ohio, three hours away. Nothing kept Kiser from practicing in Ohio, even though his lies had cost him his license in West Virginia. In late February 2005, Mingo County deputies had arrested Kiser and charged him with trading prescriptions for sex. The medical board rejected his request for a new license after Kiser marked no to a question about whether he had been charged with a crime during the past two years. Kiser alleged that Mingo authorities had trumped up allegations against him in retaliation for a lawsuit he had filed against them near the end of the previous year. That suit claimed Mingo deputies had falsely arrested him during a child custody dispute with his ex-wife. Debbie didn't trust Mingo County authorities either. She didn't discount that Kiser might have been railroaded. She had been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The move to Ohio didn't slow down Kiser's business. His Mingo County clientele wouldn't desert him. Every week or so, a van would pick up Bull and other passengers at stops along the two-lane and shuttle them north to Marietta. The fare was paid in pills—twenty for each prescription filled from each passenger. The drivers, in turn, sold the painkillers on the black market. Kiser arranged the shuttle service. Everyone made a lot of money.

Thirteen days before seeing Kiser, Bull had picked up a prescription for ninety hydrocodone pills for pain and sixty Xanax for anxiety at a recently opened pain clinic in Stonecoal, just north of Kermit, and he had receipts for another 120 hydrocodones and ninety Xanax prescribed there that month by a doctor who had never laid eyes on Bull. That, added to Kiser's prescriptions, placed six hundred and thirty pills in his hands over the past forty-five days, or nearly three times the recommended dosage for a patient with severe pain—all dispensed by Sav-Rite Pharmacy, the lone drugstore in Kermit. He paid $558 in cash.

Bull's last prescription was filled on September 29. He'd lumbered into the Sav-Rite on Lincoln Street, and the pharmacy's owner was there that day. His name was on the storefront sign: JIM WOOLEY'S SAV-RITE PHARMACY. He was sixty-eight now, his beard bushy and white. Wooley was affable, friendly to his customers, always a smile on his face, a people person, a salesman. Bull's prescription caught Wooley's attention, but not because it was written by Dr. Kiser at a clinic 170 miles away in Marietta. Wooley not only knew Kiser, but he had recently loaned him $5,000, two days after Kiser was arrested at the pain clinic in Williamson. Everybody knew one another in Mingo County. Bloody Mingo, the locals called it—birthplace of the Hatfield and McCoy feud, the Matewan massacre, a place where mine owners and union workers settled disputes with rifles, but now a place where drug merchants were calling the shots. The pain-addled addicts didn't stand a chance.

Wooley would claim at a deposition that he didn't know about Kiser's troubles with the Mingo County Prosecuting Attorney's Office and the West Virginia Board of Osteopathic Medicine. Nobody had told Wooley, and, no, he hadn't read about it in the Williamson Daily News or Mountain Citizen, the newspaper published across the river in Kentucky. What gave Wooley pause about Bull's prescriptions was the switch from hydrocodone to oxycodone. So he pulled Bull aside and counseled him, right there at the pharmacy, warned him about the change to a stronger painkiller, and not to take the extended and immediate release at the same time, and, whatever you do, don't chew on the OxyContin. That was his advice. That was it.

Excerpted from Death in Mud Lick by Eric Eyre. Copyright © 2020 by Eric Eyre. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.