A deftly told, immensely relevant, true-life potboiler from the streets of urban America.
Freelance journalist Sullivan (The Price of Experience, 1996) scathingly indicts racial/cultural politics and law enforcement in post–Drug War America.
The author shrewdly focuses on the experiences of veteran LAPD detective Russell Poole. Beginning with a seemingly random 1997 traffic shootout between a black plainclothes policeman and a white one, Poole was plunged into a maelstrom of felony investigations involving rap music figures and rogue cops. While the murders of Tupac Shakur in 1996 and Biggie Smalls in 1997 (the latter perceived as retaliatory for the former) exploded against the backdrop of celebrity gangsta-rap culture, Poole’s initial investigation of the black officer killed in the shootout collided with departmental secrecy, revealing a cop kept on the job despite numerous unsavory incidents. As Poole’s investigation overlapped Smalls’s murder, the Death Row Records empire of the notoriously violent Suge Knight was linked to an LA gang, then to a network of cops who performed favors for Knight’s criminal associates and who may have been involved in Smalls’s murder. Yet Poole found his investigation stymied at every turn by LAPD Internal Affairs and the inner circle of then-Chief Bernard Parks, determined not to impeach the integrity of minority officers in the wake of the Rodney King scandal. Sullivan contrasts Poole’s stellar career-fitness reports with the hostility he faced from fellow officers and superiors, especially after connections developed between Death Row, an ex-officer’s brazen bank robbery, various murder investigations, and the emerging scandal involving the Rampart CRASH unit. (Poole eventually resigned from the LAPD and filed a civil suit against the department.) Evidently, the drug money that first militarized the LA gangs also provided seed money for cultural behemoths like Death Row and corrupted officers in tactical units like Ramparts CRASH, unleashing further havoc on beleaguered communities. Sullivan uses unadorned prose to convey a complex tale rife with ambiguities.
A deftly told, immensely relevant, true-life potboiler from the streets of urban America.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-838-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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