Big Cover Story - Paperback

by Jeff Sykes (Author)

In Greensboro, North Carolina, Bingham Park sits atop the buried remains of the city's industrial past: a shuttered incinerator, a toxic landfill, and decades of municipal neglect disguised as green space. When strange discoloration resurfaces in the creek and neighborhood children begin falling ill, longtime resident Goldie Hayes turns to Dr. Alan Ransome, an urban-systems researcher whose career has been devoted to documenting environmental injustice the city refuses to confront.

Across town, Paula Moss, the poised and politically connected wife of hospital executive David Moss, moves through the world of benefits, boardrooms, and curated civic philanthropy. Paula once loved Alan, long before she chose David's certainty and the insulation of power. As the hospital's expansion at a long-neglected site on South Elm Street accelerates, Paula becomes the public face of a project built on omissions she does not yet understand. When Alan's latest op-ed on Bingham Park unsettles her conscience, the old fault lines between who she is and who she might have been begin to widen.

Meanwhile, Keith Collins, a data analyst for a global investment firm and Alan's former closest friend, spots irregularities in the funding structure for the hospital's wellness corridor. A parcel marked "remediation pending" has no remediation plan; a property classified as "clean" has no paper trail to justify it. When Keith uncovers the archived environmental report Alan is hunting, he realizes the cover-up is systemic-designed to sanitize the land's history so the hospital and its partners can build unchallenged.

As Alan's digging threatens to slow the project, the city and Guilford Health System tighten their public narrative, dismissing community concerns as "legacy perception issues." But the facts accumulate: altered reports, suppressed soil tests, disappearing files, and a quiet campaign to redirect Bingham Park cleanup funds to the next phase of downtown development.