While a smoldering Chicago waits to burst into flames, one good cop is racing against time and a hired killer to stop his town from burning down. Charlie Newton has the chops to bring this blistering story to gritty life. His cop is not an entirely nice guy and his methods might warrant some polish... but he's not here to make you like him. Charlie weaves his tale masterfully and like all his books, it's filled with flawed and very believable characters. The action is fast paced, the body count high all done with close attention to the city's complicated history and landscape. Read it, it's worth it.
Canaryville
by Charlie Newton
“Taut, gripping, and hauntingly dark. This is Charlie Newton at his best.” —Robert Dugoni, bestselling author of the Tracy Crosswhite series“Charlie Newton is one of my favorite writers, and he keeps getting better, which is scary. Canaryville sizzles. It burns with the kind of passion that makes Chicago beautiful and brutal.” —Jonathan Eig, bestselling author of Ali: A LifeChicago has always been a slaughterhouse.Awash in partisan rhetoric, facing bankruptcy and a federal takeover of its police department, Chicago is thirty-six hours from imploding into a race war. Canaryville will be the flashpoint—violent, insular, bare-knuckle Irish, and fiercely defensive of what little neighborhood it has left.As the Southside musters for its massive Irish-only but now-banned St. Patrick’s Day parade, extremist groups descend from all sides. A grisly double-homicide occurs at Canaryville’s eastern border. Within hours, a pub bomb explodes at the western border. Amid the rage and carnage, a third targeted homicide rocks the neighborhood.Embattled homicide lieutenant Denny Banahan races to prove the killings are a purge within the Irish mob, not the graffiti-implied threats of another “Red Summer”—Chicago’s horrifying rampage of racial murder and arson in 1919. But the shocking secrets that Denny’s detectives begin to exhume may say otherwise.Buried in those secrets are Denny’s deep and tragic childhood roots in Canaryville, and his major sins in the violent Black neighborhoods that surround it. The explosive combination will make Denny the one cop who might stop Chicago’s long-predicted descent into Red Summer, or the one who will finally ignite it.
Reviews
Another Homerun for Charlie Newton
Newton Spins a Good Yarn!
Newton has a way with getting the reader right into the action. His background and experience of visiting, and living, in many of the places in the world that many of us have just dreamed about make his story-telling especially real; he makes you part of the action.
Canaryville is a tough area of Chicago and Charlie has lived in this area and shares it's realism, both good and bad.
He is a master at his trade; I'm looking forward to the adventure!
A wild ride through the worst and best of Chicago
Newton knows Chicago’s deepest history, and he exposes and celebrates its many flaws with vital, realistic characters in situations that shout of the human condition situated in a hyper realistic intersection of police, politics, race, organized crime, Irish diaspora. You really feel the author has been on every neighbourhood street corner and drunk Guinness in every pub. It’s a thriller that excited the hell out of me. Not for the faint of heart.
A book you can’t put down
Compelling
Visceral, verbal rollercoaster of a read.
A visceral, verbal rollercoaster of a read. As always Charlie is a master of words and phrases that you can savour as you would a perfectly poured pint of Guinness. He weaves a storyline that makes you sit up and FOCUS unlike many books these days and it is well worth doing. Canaryville is a great read but it's also a visual treat as you can almost see and feel the movie it is destined to become.
Another gritty, raw novel by Charlie Newton
I have read and enjoyed all of Charlie Newton's previous books and Canaryville did not disappoint me. From the start Charlie gives you all of the raw and dark action you expect. As a life long Chicagoan I particularly appreciated the way Charlie dissected the neighborhoods and exposed their ethnicity and biases. In between the action scenes Charlie uses that space to develop his characters extremely well. In reading those sentences I was delighted to notice that they are quite often akin to the 50's free form style of the beatnik poets. Keep em coming Charlie!
Canaryville: Charlie Newton weaves another frenetic tale
I’ve read them all. Charlie never disappoints. Has no restraint either. Strap in and get ready for 15 rounds with the best writer of our times. No one has written a story with such great research and so many layers. Denny and you will be thick as thieves early on. Too many compelling characters to even begging to describe. GET THIS NOW!
A white-knuckle thriller from Chapter One—my favorite Charlie Newton yet!
Charlie always stacks the odds against his heroes—and against us readers who are rooting for them—but this time it's totally impossible.
I kept speed reading to see how these guys could possibly survive another page.
A really unique setup.
Gnarly characters.
Non-stop action and intensity.
I can't wait to read it again... in a few years when I can handle it again!
