A restauranteur is faced with a choice he thought he’d left behind when his dying uncle, a Milwaukee crime lord, taps him to become the next Don.

Haunted by the murder of his fiancée, Chance McQueen—once a musician on the cusp of success but now a restaurateur—knows alcohol and toxic relationships are choices slowly killing his soul. Trying to balance the scales between guilt and redemption, Chance takes under his wing a fatherless teen and mentors him through the dramatic ups and downs of first love and the stutter steps of budding adulthood.

But Chance is the last living relative of Don Carmelo, a Milwaukee crime lord, and when Chance’s uncle taps him to become the next head of the family, his life spins out of control like an empty scotch bottle kicked down an alleyway.

Not sure he can rescue himself; Chance focuses on rescuing Winnie. Awkward, sweet, and soulful, 19-year-old Winnie is suspended in the inertia of waiting for life to begin and not being sure where to start. Navigating first love, parental loss, and trying to find purpose, Winnie knows he must grow up—while Chance is figuring out he’s not quite the man he knows he needs to be.

With a lover whose secret agenda is to destroy the family, her mobbed-up husband who wants Chance dead, and a hotshot U.S. Attorney poking around, it will take all of Chance’s street smarts and the naive courage of his teen protégée to survive a criminal empire built on murder.

Brilliantly evocative of life at the tail end of the 80s, and perfect for readers of Dennis Lehane, it blends the teenage angst of Pretty in Pink, with the darkness of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Falling onto Cotton is a razor-sharp, richly atmospheric and deeply moving portrait of a boy becoming a man, a man finding his code, and the dark underbelly of organized crime that surrounds them both. It marks the introduction of a bold new voice in the genre.