Excerpt from Dopesick by Beth Macy, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I head northwest toward West Virginia, the crumbling landscape like so many of the distressed towns I've already traversed in Virginia some four hundred miles south, down to the same HILLARY FOR PRISON signs and the same Confederate flags waving presciently from their posts.

At the prison, I park my car and walk through the heavy front door. A handler named Rachel ushers me through security, making cheerful small talk as we head deeper inside the concrete maze and through three different sets of locked doors, her massive cluster of keys reverberating like chimes at each checkpoint.

We pass through a recreation area, where several men—all but one of the prisoners black and brown, I can't help noticing—push mops and brooms around the cavernous room, looking up and nodding as we pass. The manufactured air inside is cold, and it smells of Clorox.

Ronnie Jones is already waiting for me on the other side of the last locked door, seated at a table. He looks thinner and older than he did in his mug shot, his prison khakis baggy, his trim Afro and beard flecked with gray. He looks tired, and the whites of his eyes are tinged with red.

He rises from the chair to shake my hand, then sits back down, his hands folded into a steeple, his elbows resting on the table between us. His mood is unreadable.

The glassed-in room is beige, the floors are beige, and so is Rachel, in her beige-and-blue uniform and no-nonsense shoes, the kind you could run in if you had to. She tells us to knock on the window if we need her, then leaves for her perch in the rec room, on the other side of the window, the door lock clicking decisively behind her.

I open my notebook, situate the questions I've prepared off to the side, next to my spare pens. I'm thinking of Kristi and Ginger and of Tess's mom, and what Jones might say that will explain the fate of these mothers' kids.

Jones leans forward, expectant and unsmiling, and rubs his hands together, as if we're business associates sitting down to hammer out a deal.

Then he takes a deep breath and, relaxing back into his chair, he waits for me to start.

Excerpted from Dopesick by Beth Macy. Copyright © 2018 by Beth Macy. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.