Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

The short recommendation: This was the best nonfiction I read all year. The long recommendation: Jill Leovy, journalist for the Los Angeles Times, does a masterful job of tracing the history of crime and law enforcement in LA through the murder of a black teenager named Bryant Tennelle. Her lens widens as she lays out the evolution of a criminal justice system that imprisons millions of inmates yet (in LA, at least) solves only a small percentage of the murders. This is such a gripping and important story, I've given this book as a gift many times. Recommended By Bart K., Powells.com

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 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 cities — and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.

“Leovy’s relentless reporting has produced a book packed with valuable, hard-won insights — and it serves as a crucial, 366-page reminder that ‘black lives matter.’” The New York Times Book Review

“[Leovy writes] with grace and artistry, and controlled—but bone-deep—outrage in her new book. . . . The most important book about urban violence in a generation.” The Washington Post

“Functions both as a snappy police procedural and — more significantly — as a searing indictment of legal neglect . . . Leovy’s powerful testimony demands respectful attention.” The Boston Globe

“A serious and kaleidoscopic achievement . . . [Jill Leovy is] 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

Jill Leovy is an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.