Shadow People: how meth-driven crime is eating at the heart of rural America

Literary Nonfiction. Sleepless and paranoid methamphetamine addicts often see "shadow people" in the darkest hours of the night. Yet it is the addicts themselves that cast a shadow over the most peaceful corners of America, driven in large numbers to commit fraud, identity theft, burglary, domestic violence, elder abuse, child abuse, assault and murder.

In 2010, award-winning journalist Scott Thomas Anderson began to explore the link between crime and methamphetamine, spending sixteen months as an embedded reporter with rural county law enforcement agencies and traveling to dozens of small towns battling the epidemic across the United States. The result is SHADOW PEOPLE, an unflinching look at the havoc and heartache meth spawns in the open countryside—a window to how the drug is threatening America's wide open country spaces, fueling crimes against citizens, breaking families apart, devastating innocent children and tearing away at the psyche of each community through which it spreads.

"A compelling and up-close look at one of the most corrosive issues that our communities face...this book is full of the kind of front-line reporting and gritty detail needed to illuminate the meth scourge."—Greg Miller, National Security Report, The Washington Post