Covering Crime in the Safest State in the Nation

For the last thirty years, Eric Francis has covered crime in Vermont, the state with, according to the statistics, the lowest crime rate in the nation. But statistics are statistics and people are people, and Eric, who calls himself the last of the living dinosaurs, is out there day after day reporting on robberies, assaults, car accidents, and the rising tide of drug overdoses due to fentanyl. It’s far from quiet in the safest state in the US. Every day brings something new and more often than not strange (in a Vermont way). As recently as six years ago, there would have been other reporters and photographers covering these stories. Now, in the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire, Eric is the only local journalist on the scene, any scene. This book chronicles the life and times of one of the very last people paying attention to what’s really going on in a rural New England that only seems tranquil…

Dispatches from individual lives, as they happen: Each short book originates in short confidences recorded by individuals during borrowed moments from their interesting lives. Set amidst some of our most pressing contemporary predicaments and edited by award-winning writers Peter Orner and Laura Lampton Scott, Dispatches captures some of the highs and lows of daily human endurance.