(Spoiler alert: The ending of “Savages” is discussed in the first several paragraphs of this story.)

Prequel? Not exactly – at least writer Don Winslow doesn’t look at it that way.

Sure, he says, his best-selling new book, “The Kings of Cool,” picks up the story of the characters he killed off in “Savages,” the 2010 novel made into an Oliver Stone movie released July 6. And yes, he’ll cop to the fact that the book itself says, “The Kings of Cool: Prequel to Savages,” right on the cover.

But the veteran crime writer simply doesn’t look at it that way.

“I picked up the characters in ‘Savages’ a week before the end of their lives,” Winslow says, sitting in a conference room at Simon & Schuster, his publisher, a couple of weeks before Stone’s “Savages” was released – and savaged – by critics. “They were these old young people. But I also knew their backstory – and I got hungry to tell it. I didn’t want to do ‘The Previous Adventures of…’ because that seemed kind of shallow. But I wanted to tell the larger story of it.” (More…)