Collected Works welcomes novelist Charlie Newton for the release of his second book, Start Shooting.  In this gritty novel, Officer Bobby Vargas and actress Arleen Brennan understand hopes and dreams, the bet-it-all kind that wihter propel you through the fire or burn you to death.  At age thirteen a gruesome rape/murder rocked their lives and the unforgiving streets of Chicago’s Four Corners.  Now, twenty-nie years later, a dying Chicago newspaper plans a serial expose on that “solved” case, threatening to implicate Bobby and his older brother, Ruben – a decorated detective, patron del barrio.  The “expose” will lead Arleen and the Vargas brothers down an increasingly twisted and terrifying path, where the sins of the past threaten to destroy what remains of the truth.  As readers and critics discovered in this first novel, Calumet City, Charlie Newton’s Chicago is a landscape as brutal and poignant as any modern crime fiction-a multi-faceted, shockingly violent labyrinth of gangland politics, political backstabbing, corporate malfeasance, and possibly, hope.

A thumbnail on the Chicago-born author Charlie Newton reads like that of one of the characters-a fellow who has seen a bit more reality than is often healthy but come away with P.J.  O’Rourke’s sense of humor instead of angst and Hunter Thompson’s pathology sans the .44 magnum.  Charlie’s early career leaned toward pirate-adventurer rather then responsible citizen, living and working in exotic, often-unhealthy places, doing some of the devil’s business and some of the king’s.  The semi-adult epiphany arrived with his thirtieth birthday.  Charlie Newton had built successful bars/restaurants and resort apartments, raced thoroughbreds that weren’t quite so successful, and brokered 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 Start Shooting and Calumet City happen.  He has lived to tell…