David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is where it all started, it is the book that directly spawned two of the best TV shows of the past 15 years and influenced many others.
A brilliant piece of non-fiction following one of the shifts of the city of Baltimore’s homicide detectives for a whole year. A compelling year of stories of tragedy which paradoxically was unremarkable for all the detectives but for the rookie Tom Pellegrini, whose first case as primary was a the rape and murder of an 11-year old girl that was never solved and probably still haunts him to this day.
Simon takes what could be a quite dry subject because real life is nothing like as dramatic as like on TV, even in the cases of The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets, and creates an enormously readable book because he understands that at its core each and every murder is a story of human beings.
