crime-beat

<p><P>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&#58; 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...</p> <h3>The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson</h3> <p>Every generation produces reporters whose talent is essentially novelistic and for whom journalism is a way station on the road to fiction. Hemingway was the classic example of the 20th century, but there are many others -- Tom Wolfe was one, and so is Connelly. For instance, here's the lead of the first crime story reprinted in the book, from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 1987: It has been four days since anybody has heard from or seen Walter Moody, and people are thinking that something is wrong. It's not the typical who-what-when-where-why-and- how formula of police reporting. Connelly was always looking for mood, drama, eccentricity, the telling detail. One of the fascinations of this collection is spotting the police-beat details -- the fellow with teardrops tattooed below his eyes, the detective who chewed the earpiece of his glasses -- that later punctuate the Bosch novels.</p>