A veteran sports columnist unexpectedly loses his job. A rebellious young writer takes a weed-clouded trip to Southern California with a tawdry dropout. An English teacher at a prep school toils in vain on a breakthrough novel, watching his teen-aged pupils grow rebellious and decadent. All are related. All are drawn together as they gradually learn they are pawns in a vast illegal conspiracy. The columnist's new job is not one he chooses. The young writer mistakenly believes she is selling drugs by choice and rationalizes it in the name of writing a tell-all novel. The teacher sees in his charges mistakes he has already made. One is another's daughter. She is the other's lover. Everything will be fine as long as they are obedient. Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Against the backdrop of a presidential election, a group of powerful men work to corner the market on the illicit sale of marijuana. They have members with ties to tobacco, entertainment, law enforcement, national security, and politics. Innocent people are being shot down in the streets by policemen who never are punished. Could this be more than coincidence? The plan seems perfect ... until the election of Martin Gaynes, a man as corrupt as those who run the Consortium. Extreme measures are necessary as a potential dictatorship rises in the tumult. No one, no matter how far from the center of power, is safe. No one can afford to mind his (or her) own business. Don't Ask, Don't Tell becomes dangerous, impractical, and deadly.
About the Author: Monte Dutton lives in Clinton, South Carolina, where he was born in 1958, and graduated from Furman University with a B.A. in political science/history in 1980. He spent twenty seasons writing about NASCAR and won writer-of-the-year awards from the Eastern Motorsports Press Association in 2003 and the National Motorsports Press Association in 2008. Don't Ask, Don't Tell is Dutton's eighth novel. The first novel, The Audacity of Dope, and second, The Intangibles, were published by Neverland Publishing LLC, of Miami, Fla. Crazy of Natural Causes and Forgive Us Our Trespasses were published in July by Kindle Publishing through it's KindleScout program. He writes short stories, several of which have been published in regional publications, and at wellpilgrim.wordpress.com. He self-published a collection, Longer Songs, in 2016. Novels five, six, and seven - Cowboys Come Home, Lightning in a Bottle, and Life Gets Complicated -- were published within the span of a year. Dutton has written several books about auto racing, among them biographies of drivers Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart. He also wrote True to the Roots: Americana Music Revealed.