Shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2009.
Judges’ comments: An addictively good read, original, pacy, with a ballsy and believable heroine and a complex and absorbing plot. A great sense of place and real tension. Sharp and distinctive voice.
Patti Black is the most decorated cop in Chicago; a ghetto street officer, she redefines the word badass. But the steel-plated exterior she shows to the world - solitary, friendless, loveless - hides the hideous traumas of her past. As an orphaned child, she was horribly sexually abused by her foster parents, and the torments of the past are only barely contained by her meticulously maintained tough-guy persona. When a serious of seemingly unrelated cases - a drug bust gone bad, a mayoral assassination attempt, the abduction and murder of a state attorney, a long-hidden body walled up in a tenement basement - all point in her direction, she comes to the horrified realization that her past is no longer staying in its deeply suppressed place. It's back and hunting her down...
A thumbnail on the Chicago-born author reads like that of one of his characters – a fellow who, in his mid-fifties, has seen a bit more reality than is often healthy but come away with P. J. O’Rourke’s sense of humour instead of angst. Charlie Newton has built successful restaurants and hotels, raced thoroughbreds that weren’t quite so successful and sold television and film in the Middle East to gentlemen who often weren’t. Generally speaking, he’s lived a life in the borderlands (literal and figurative) where stories like CALUMET CITY happen. And survived to enjoy it.
