Made in America: or The Tragedy of Billy Castle and Unexpected Absolution of Dean Willis

Billy Castle is twenty-five years old, commuting from Queens to Manhattan to serve drinks to uptowners, keep his alcoholic mother afloat, and outrun the reputation of a father whose name still echoes through certain corners of the city—whose ostensibly random murder in a liquor store by an unknown shooter when Billy was a child left behind nothing but a name that carries weight in all the places Billy has spent his whole life avoiding.

On his first week working at the Palace, one of Manhattan's most exclusive nightclubs, Billy witnesses the execution of an Italian capo in the loading dock after being sent down to retrieve a crate of booze. Instead of silencing him on the spot, the club's untouchable owner—who moonlights as the city's most feared contrabandist—Archer Stone, gives him a moment to make his case. The air changes when he hears Billy's last name, and from that moment on, Billy's life begins to follow a path he swore he'd never take—and one he never expected to be so intoxicating.

Forced into the role of accomplice, the novel's five-act structure follows Billy's ascent through a world of ambition, loyalty, and violence, where power moves quietly and nothing stays buried. Meanwhile, federal agent Dean Willis is hunting Archer Stone, chasing fragments of a past he can't fully remember—one that may tie all three men together in ways none of them can imagine, and potentially reveal the devastating truth behind his missing wife and daughter.

Touted by readers as "a triumph in crime fiction" and "impossible to put down," Made in America delivers as a literary crime epic about inheritance, power, and the machinery of the American dream.