Showing Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

"NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLER A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in America 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 . . . [JillLeovy 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""" Gritty, heart-wrenching . . . Everyone needs to read this book. Michael Connelly "Ghettoside" is remarkab