Homicide is a year-in-the-life and the day-in, day-out chronicle of the Baltimore Police Department's Homicide Unit. Twice every three days a citizen is shot, stabbed or bludgeoned to death. The city's homicide unit is a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in urban America. It records the mundane and the abominable. It documents the daily grind of real detectives and gives us a peek into a very bleak but real world of violence in America.
The book is later fictionalized into a police procedural television series entitled Homicide: Life On The Street (1993-1999), also written and produced by the author. All reviews sum Homicide: A Life On The Killing Streets (1991) as a true crime classic, a masterpiece and a hard-nosed classic. It is among the most powerful non-fiction crime books I have read in my lifetime. Do read it if you are into real-life crimes because this is the bona fide manuscript of the real-life world of homicide detectives. My paperback copy is a 2009 reprint.
About the author: David Simon's Homicide won an Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime in 1992 and became the basis for the NBC award-winning drama. Simon's second book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997), co-authored with Edward Burns, was made into an HBO mini-series. Simon is currently the executive producer and screenwriter for HBO's Peabody Award-winning series The Wire. In 2010, Simon was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship (the Genius Grant). He lives in Baltimore.
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