Calumet City
Meet Patti Black, the most decorated cop in Chicago. Solitary, stoic, loveless—her steel-plated exterior belies the wrenching legacy of an orphan childhood. Plagued by the horrifying abuse suffered at the hands of her foster parents, Black sublimates past torments into a meticulously maintained ghetto-tough persona.
When a series of unrelated cases—a drug bust gone bad, a mayoral assassination attempt, the murder of a state’s attorney; and ultimately, the exhumation of a long-concealed body from a tenement basement wall—all point in Patti Black’s direction, she finds herself facing the dark truth of a dusty old chestnut: You can’t hide from your history, no matter how far into the fog you run. For Patti Black, that history didn’t die in the tenement wall; it’s alive—and riding her down.