Authors: Michael Connelly, Howard Samuel
ISBN-13: 9781415930045, ISBN-10: 141593004X
Format: MP3 Book
Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group
Date Published: December 2007
Edition: Unabridged
A former Los Angeles Times crime reporter, Michael Connelly s familiarity with the seamy side of L.A. adds a steamy kind of street cred to his hardboiled, gritty detective novels -- especially his bestselling series of mysteries featuring dark detective Hieronymous Harry Bosch.
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: 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...
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.