Body Traffick

Reporter Clay Hawthorne, who prefers to be called Thorne, is struggling in his romantic life when a chance meeting with a striking woman draws him into an inquiry about sex trafficking. He learns that human trafficking is a global business worth billions of dollars, one that takes the liberty of millions of people for profit and has spread to every part of the United States, Kentucky included.

In Kentucky, owners of restaurants and other businesses are regularly arrested for forcing workers to labor in inhumane conditions. Social workers often see people charged with what they call "family pimping," but Thorne is determined to uncover the larger trade in sex trafficking, which pushes hundreds of women and girls into a modern form of slavery. Following that trail leads him into a clash with a racist motorcycle gang. He concentrates on erotic massage parlors, more than ten thousand across the country and hundreds in Kentucky, and he finds white nationalist Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, a growing presence, woven into the case.

Thorne concludes that trafficking operates at every level, from upscale escort services and small-town rings to chains of massage parlors, all concealed in plain view. Exposing the criminal networks that run these chains is hard and perilous. He reluctantly accepts help from a former escort, a mysterious and beautiful woman with a past she would rather leave behind.

Meanwhile, white nationalist militias and Nazis recruiting in Kentucky, driven by delusional conspiracy theories, have marked the Bluegrass Herald, his newspaper, as an enemy of white supremacy. After an attack on the paper's building and a run of threatening emails, Thorne takes action.