House, Richard - Dishonest Days

1986, the Laos–Cambodia border. Fourteen women drown in an accident, all of them participants in a drug trial for Panzet Pharmaceuticals. Scattered between their bodies, boxes of Aspinex DP1024, the unstable and highly addictive variant of a painkiller sold by Panzet. Their deaths are covered up, along with the drug’s harmful side effects. Cuna, Colombia. West Core, an American mining company, funds the worst excesses of the Colombian civil war, laundering money for the cartels. The company forces 35 miners to smuggle a cache of emeralds into the United States: their backs are cut open, the jewels inserted into the flesh, and stitched closed. Edgerton, Wyoming. Peter Norstrom, an employee of West Core, dies of an AIDS-related illness after his employers cut his health insurance in a petty act of revenge. His lover Tom Gellert, seeks retribution. At the heart of all this sit Richard and Patsy Wildemann, the reclusive billionaire owners of Panzet and West Core, who profit from war and disease while laundering their reputations through art and philanthropy. Dishonest Days is an epic and gripping novel about drugs, emeralds, and those swept up and screwed over by powerful people.