An accident occurs in an isolated small town in Wisconsin and someone wants to keep it secret at all cost.
Another taut thriller from the mother and daughter writing team that make up P.J. Tracy. I’m continually amazed at how they manage to retain the characters from their brilliant debut Want to Play? and use them in the sequels without it feeling unnatural.
Grace MacBride and Leo Magozzi are a wonderful unconventional couple and their relationship is at the core of this novel.
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.
A really excellent and powerful film, I think Robert Downey Jr. is great in it and Jamie Foxx gives a brilliantly moving performance. It was harder to watch than I thought would be as it is not quite the feel good movie that it’s been portrayed as being but then it is a true story and real life is always more complicated than fiction. It is quite dark look at the problem of homelessness in Los Angeles and the associated issue of mental health. There are over 80 000 homeless people in LA and it seems most of them if they didn’t have mental health issues before which were a factor in them becoming homeless then the situation of being on the streets causes them to develop issues. But that being said it does leave you with a message about the power of friendship and caring for our fellow man.
