Who in the audience has had a family member or friend struggling with drug addiction? It makes one angry at the perpetrators of the drug epidemic, doesn’t it? Whether it’s big pharmaceutical companies, or street level drug traffickers.
I’ll tell you who else is angered by drug traffickers: Nicholas Stryker. Nick has returned from a deployment to Iraq and is decompressing by going back to college at Seacoast University in New Hampshire, and also coaching sports there. The sister of a childhood friend in scenic mid-Hudson Valley, New York asks him to visit the family compound. Nick’s friend from childhood, Tom Donovan, has been in and out of drug rehab centers. Tom’s sister suggests that Nick might be able to find the root of Tom’s inner suffering, buried in their shared past.
Nick arrives in the riverside town of Silver Spring, and begins to make his inquiries. He makes stops at the offices of the Donovan family lawyer, and the local police department. Nick gets the sense that his old high school hockey coach, who Tom had contact with as well, has a hidden past that he is keen to keep buried.
Nick is revisited by his own tortured dreams of something that happened in the bowels of his old high school, when he and Tom went there for hockey camps as kids. The local power structure, plus some salty street level characters, throw obstacles up to hinder Nick in his investigation.
Nick pushes forward, with a Deadpool-like sarcasm as his first line of defense. When witnesses are threatened who are coming forward to assist him, Nick’s anger peaks and there is a violent showdown with the local thugs. Then, when the dust settles and perpetrators of past crimes are sentenced and locked away, an old adversary of Nick's steps out of the shadows and demands a reckoning.
My intent with this kind of fiction is to use the template of classic hard-boiled detective stories and apply them to current events. Thank you.
