From the # 1 New York Times–bestselling author of Black Hawk Down: The “shocking” story of the country’s unlikeliest drug kingpin (The Baltimore Sun).
By the early 1980s, Larry Lavin seemed to have everything going for him. He was a bright, charismatic young man who rose from working-class upbringings in a Massachusetts mill town to become a dentist with an Ivy League education and a thriving practice—a beloved father with a well-respected family in one of Philadelphia’s most exclusive suburbs.
But behind the façade of his success was a dark secret: Lavin was also the mastermind behind a cocaine empire that spread from Miami to Boston to New Mexico, catering to lawyers, stockbrokers, and other professionals, and generating an annual income of $60 million for the good doctor.
Now, Mark Bowden, a “master of narrative journalism” (The New York Times Book Review) tells the harrowing saga of Lavin’s rise and fall in “a shocking American tragedy . . . [that] shoots straight from the hip” (The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette).
“An engrossing crime story and a compelling morality tale.” —The Arizona Republic
“Has all the elements of a chilling suspense thriller . . . A smoothly crafted, exciting, can’t-put-it-down book.” —The New Voice (Louisville)
“Bowden has emerged as one of our best writers of muscular nonfiction.” —The Denver Post
