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.
Among the most self-assured and sharply crafted debuts in recent years, a finalist for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel, and an International Thriller Writers Award, and named the American Library Association's Best Crime Novel Debut of 2008 (one of six),Calumet City detonates a Molotov cocktail of character-driven suspense and ghetto-Chicago intrigue. Meet Patti Black, the most decorated cop in Chicago. On her ghetto beat, Patti Black redefines the word badass. But her steel-plated exteriorsolitary, stoic, lovelessbelies the wrenching legacy of her orphan childhood. Haunted by the horrifying abuse she suffered at the hands of her foster parents, Patti Black sublimates past torments into a meticulously maintained tough-gal persona.Whena series of unrelated casesa drug bust gone bad, a mayoral assassination attempt, the murder of a state attorney, the exhumation of a long-concealed body from a tenement basement wallall point in Patti Black's direction, she finds herself facing the dark truth: 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 aliveand riding her down. In researching this electrifying thriller, Charlie Newton rode in the squad car with real-life street cop Patti Black. The result is a powerful fiction debut that captures the precise emotional landscape of one cop's hard-bitten life in the trenches. This author joins that rare bread whose fiction is suffused with profound authenticity.
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.
