Tom Jones, author of Jackson

The Jackson Packing Company is in trouble. The old-line family-owned firm, once one of the largest in the country, now struggles merely to survive in the fiercely competitive meatpacking industry. When a major marketing agreement is cancelled, bankruptcy is imminent. More than two thousand people will lose their jobs, but the secretive company continues to avoid public scrutiny, the coming calamity known by only a few. Assigned the job of unmasking the firm, Rachel Brandeis, an ambitious young reporter from the East Coast, spends weeks exhausting every possible resource. When at last she succeeds, however, that only signals the beginning of an attempt to save the company by selling it to its employees. To succeed, decades of animosity between company officials and the union representing most of the workers must be wiped away. At the center of the turmoil stand CEO Skip Peterson, obsessed with saving his family’s firm, and skeptical Union President Homer Budge, reluctant allies deserted by many of their former colleagues as they attempt the near impossible.