Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers
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Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat. In these vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the listener past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends and, of course, the killers to tell the real stories or murder and its aftermath.CRIME BEAT presents stories as fascinating as they are chilling, from the serial killer of young models who cuts a swath across the country to elude police, to the man who leads a bizarre double life on two coasts before his elaborate hoax breaks down. Here, too, we can see Connelly's razor-sharp eye for telling details: a worn-down earpiece on a cop's eyeglasses, the revealing high school yearbook quotes of an alleged cold-blooded murderer, the checkered career of a bumbling gang of killers who publicly advertise their services.Stranger than fiction and every bit as gripping, these pieces show once again that Mich... The New York Times - Charles Taylor Connelly is particularly good in a section titled "Death Squad," about a case involving a Los Angeles Police Department squad that surreptitiously followed people suspected of criminal activity and allowed crimes to take place. The reasoning was that the cops would then have a better chance of convicting them once they were arrested. In the case Connelly writes about, it allowed the cops to act as executioners right after the crime. This is exactly the sort of subject that calls for hardheadedness, and Connelly supplies it, not in his prose but in his determination not to take the word of authority simply because it comes from authority. The articles that make up "Death Squad" suggest there is a place for the hard-boiled influence in reporting. Not by aping the prose of Chandler and his progeny, but by following the motto of a less glamorous icon, Jack Webb's Joe Friday: Just the facts.
