Description

When three-year-old Ashley Sizer dies in his driveway, Vane “Sarge” Walker—Vietnam veteran, retired ranger, and county EMT—decides the pill-mill plague swallowing Kituwah Falls has taken its last child. Meanwhile eighteen-year-old Samantha Walker, fierce, brilliant, and still carrying the grief of her father killed in Afghanistan, turns her court-ordered journal into a record of everything adults pretend not to see: the Wruck gang running oxy for Odessa’s clinic network, deputies playing both sides, and a county so gutted by addiction it can’t tell the living from the dying. As Sarge prepares to tear the whole operation out “by the roots” and Samantha edges closer to danger she doesn’t yet recognize, their stories collide against a drug economy fed by Miami money, local desperation, and a hunger that started long before either of them were born. Jellybeaners is a raw, unflinching Appalachian story about grief, corruption, and the people who fight like hell for a county that keeps burying its own.