Broken Ground

Jay Porter Takes on the Brutality of Small-town Political Power and Insatiable Greed

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 the hard drive 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.

Perfect for Fans of Dennis Lehane

While all of the novels in the Jay Porter Series stand on their own and can be read in any order, the publication sequence is:

Lamentation
December Boys
Give Up the Dead
Broken Ground
Rag and Bone

A former homeless junkie, Joe Clifford has dedicated his life to education and the craft of writing and helping other ex-junkies find a voice and a platform for their creative energies. He is a graduate of Central Connecticut State University and holds an MFA degree from Florida International University. He is the acquisitions editor for Gutter Books and the producer of Lip Service West, a gritty reading series in Oakland, California. Clifford is the author of several acclaimed books—two of which were Anthony Award nominees: Lamentation, his first novel in the Jay Porter series, and his anthology (editor) Trouble in the Heartland. Broken Ground is the fourth novel in his Jay Porter series. In all his Jay Porter novels, Clifford uses the backdrop of drug abuse to shine a light on the misunderstood and marginalized, while weaving personal tragedies into narratives that compel and transcend as well as entertain. Clifford lives with his wife, Justine, and two sons in the San Francisco Bay Area.