Author: David Simon

Title:  Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

Description: I loved the TV show that was based on this book, so I was happy to get the book. Simon decided to take a full year and follow the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide unit. The characters in the show were given different names than those in the book, but the book does match them up.

Source: Penguin

Writing style: Simon is really detailed—the book runs to almost 700 pages long. Many of the features of the show are here: the board with the open cases in red and the closed cases in black, the inter-departmental politics, and the strong sense of Baltimore as a place.

Audience: readers of creative nonfiction. Mystery readers might also like this real-life police procedural.

Wrap-up: The book was a little long for my taste, but it did give the sense of a year passing (it didn’t take me quite that long to read; I started it in May, so six months). I got the characters mixed up as well; there were a few too many of them, and the names didn’t line up with the names I was used to. 3.5/5.