
Meet
Patti Black, the most decorated cop in Chicago. On her
ghetto beat,
Patti Black redefines the word badass. But her steel-plated
exterior --
solitary, stoic, loveless -- belies 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. When a
series of
unrelated cases -- a 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 wall -- all
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 alive
-- and 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 first-time author joins that rare breed whose
fiction is
suffused with profound authenticity.
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