Ghettoside - 9780385529983

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 at all costs for forgotten victims. 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 America—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.

Praise for Ghettoside

“Jill Leovy has written a gripping and powerful account of urban homicide investigation in the United States. Ghettoside is a provocative examination of how and why murder happens and a fast-paced crime narrative in the vein of David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove

“Ghettoside is a brilliant taxonomic investigation into the American violence epidemic disguised as a highly entertaining true crime book. In this account of the senseless shooting death of Bryant Tennelle, Jill Levoy has used the vehicle of a page-turning police procedural to force Americans to face some ugly truths about the root causes of urban violence. She makes a convincing argument that inner-city lawlessness is the legacy of our long history of legal apartheid, where whites ‘have the law’ and black people do not—and does so in the form of a compelling mystery story.”—Matt Taibbi, author of The Divide

“This absorbing first book from journalist Leovy traces the investigation and prosecution of a 2007 murder in South Los Angeles, registering along the way a powerful argument about race and our criminal justice system. . . . . Readers may come for Leovy’s detective story; they will stay for her lucid social critique.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)