NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE
YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, USA TODAY, AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE -
A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a
relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in America
**
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST
BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - The Washington
Post - The Boston Globe - The Economist - The Globe and Mail
- BookPage - Kirkus Reviews**
On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and
killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of
black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street,
jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in
American cities who are never arrested for their crimes.
But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds
shift.
Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly
ignored, American murder--a "ghettoside" killing, one young black man
slaying another--and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose
creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs.
Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an
intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a
surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our
cities--and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.
Praise for Ghettoside
"A serious and kaleidoscopic achievement . . . [Jill Leovy is] a crisp
writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of
information into hard journalistic rain."--Dwight Garner, The New
York Times
"Masterful . . . gritty reporting that matches the police work behind
it."--Los Angeles Times
"Moving and engrossing."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Penetrating and heartbreaking . . . Ghettoside points out how
relatively little America has cared even as recently as the last decade
about the value of young black men's lives."--USA Today
"Functions both as a snappy police procedural and--more
significantly--as a searing indictment of legal neglect . . . Leovy's
powerful testimony demands respectful attention."--The Boston
Globe
