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.

Readers are likely to need a day off work after finishing Newton’s breakneck debut—they’ll have been up all night . . . highly original.
Booklist (starred review)
A galloping ride from first page to last.
Kirkus
The best cop noir in years . . .
—Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author
Fierce . . . terrific . . . down and dirty.
—Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Sunday Book Review

Raw, heart-pounding, adrenalin-producing fiction doesn’t get much better than this. Highly recommended.
—Michele Leber, Library Journal

The literary equivalent of speeding down an amusement park water slide only to find an industrial strength meat grinder awaiting you at the bottom: By the time you realize what’s happening, it’s already much too late to turn back . . . an intense and explosive read destined to become a cult classic.
—Paul Goat Allen, The Chicago Tribune
Machine-gun street-demotic, high octane, adrenalin drenched and breathless.
—Cath Staincliffe, The Tangled Web, UK
Best crime novel debut 2008 (one of six)
—The American Library Association