Authors @ Night @ DPL

The second lecture in our Local Authors series will be held this Monday evening, Jan. 31 @ 7:oopm. Harrison Thorp will be here to discuss his new novel Freak the News: Journalistic High Jinks in a Small Maine Town.

Freak the News is the story of Chris a 50-something seasoned journalist who enjoys a good drink. After years away from the field, he returns to his first love, the copy desk, at a small newspaper in Maine. Shawn, a talented writer fresh out of journalism school, winds up at the same paper. He wants to hang around long enough to make a name for himself, get some clips and move on to a big-city paper. When a surgical deaths story at the local hospital is killed by newspaper executives, Chris and Shawn become suspicious and discover a scheme that involves the blackmail of an alcoholic physician into naming a cardiac care center after the paper. Against the backdrop of a frantic, fractious and bawdy newsroom, Chris and Shawn, each at times fearful and uncertain about their commitment to the cause, find themselves driven on to a climax that exposes the bad guys and gives the paper's readers a front page they'll never forget.

After 20 years in the newspaper business spent working at 10 different newspapers, Mr. Thorp has seen the good, the bad and the ugly in journalism in its rawest form. And he writes it that way in his new book, Freak the News. From Vermont to Virginia to New Hampshire and Maine, he's worked as a reporter, sports editor, city editor as well as editor of the Foster's Sunday Citizen where he won three Newspaper of the Year awards. He was also a sports editor in the early '90s at the Portsmouth Herald.