The Confession

A retired Chicago cop. A folder he shouldn't open. A confession that could burn down the city.

At 4:15 on a freezing January morning, a young man in an Audi slips a bag of cash into the depository slot of a Ukrainian Catholic church and drives off into the dark. It's the kind of thing nobody notices. Except two cops notice everything.

Pat Conlon and Carlos Martinez have worked Chicago's streets together for decades — partners, brothers, throwbacks who still believe in the job even when the department doesn't deserve them. When a street informant starts talking about semi-trucks, hundreds of brand-new Glocks, and an alderman nobody can touch, the partners pull a thread that runs from the gang corners of the West Side to a grocery store in Ukrainian Village, across the Atlantic to a war zone, and into a confessional where the truth finally has to be spoken out loud.

Written by former Chicago Police Officer Danny O'Toole, The Confession is a crime novel that could only come from someone who lived it — the informants, the surveillance, the politics, the loyalty, and the price of doing real police work in a city that eats its own.

Some sins get forgiven. Some get investigated.