NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ā¢Ā NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE,Ā USA TODAY,Ā AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE ā¢Ā 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 ā¢Ā NAMEDĀ ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review ā¢ The Washington Post ā¢ The Boston Globe ā¢Ā The Economist ā¢ The Globe and Mail ā¢Ā BookPage ā¢Ā 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 murderāa āghettosideā killing, one young black man slaying anotherāand 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 citiesāand how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.
Praise for Ghettoside
āA serious and kaleidoscopic achievement . . . [JillĀ Leovy is] a crisp writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of information into hard journalistic rain.āāDwight Garner,Ā The New York Times
āMasterful . . . gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.āāLos Angeles Times
āMoving and engrossing.āāSan Francisco Chronicle
āPenetrating and heartbreaking . . .Ā GhettosideĀ points out how relatively little America has cared even as recently as the last decade about the value of young black menās lives.āāUSA Today
āFunctions both as a snappy police procedural andāmore significantlyāas a searing indictment of legal neglect . . . Leovyās powerful testimony demands respectful attention.āāThe Boston Globe