Leovy's powerful testimony demands respectful attention.' - The Boston Globe 'Functions both as a snappy police procedural and-more significantly-as a searing indictment of legal neglect. 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 'Moving and engrossing.' - San Francisco Chronicle gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.' - Los Angeles Times 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 'A serious and kaleidoscopic achievement.

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. 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. 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.īut as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift. 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.

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 Description 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

Ghettoside by Jill Leovy