35 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The introduction was great but..., May 25, 2006
This review is from: Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers (Hardcover)
...it was all down hill from there. I bought this book thinking that Connelly was writing about crimes he had covered. That sounded interesting. Instead it appears to be just a reprint of old columns he wrote about various crimes. For each crime, there's a series of stand-alone articles and as a result there's lots of repetition of information from one to the next. I got bored and gave up on it after about 60 pages. It could have been very good if only Connelly had taken the info from each crime and reworked it into one story for each incident.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing..., August 18, 2007
Meh. I was hoping for more in a book of true crime by a well-reviewed mystery author, but this is just an uneditted collection of Connelly's crime-related newspaper stories from his journalist days of the 1980s and early 1990s. The stories are almost all straight newspaper stories, with all the negatives that implies--little nuance, straight facts, lots of repetitions over a series of stories about the same crime. I was hoping for something more like Ann Rule's "Crime Files" books--yes, reprints, but with some perspective and rewriting. A few of the stories were more interesting, in particular "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight", which is a longer article telling the story of an almost comically inept gang of hitman-wannabes, who unfortunately succeeded in killing a couple of their targets. This story must have been a Sunday feature or magazine article because it had more development and room to breathe without all the repetition of background details.
Okay, but I expected more from someone with Connelly's reputation.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"It all comes down to moments.", May 25, 2006
This review is from: Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers (Hardcover)
Michael Connelly's "Crime Beat" is a compilation of previously published newspaper articles that appeared in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel from 1984-1987 and in the Los Angeles Times from 1987-1992. In his introduction Connelly explains, "My experiences with cops and killers were invaluable to me as a novelist." Readers beware! This is not a Harry Bosch novel, nor is it a stand-alone thriller. The book is divided into three sections: the cops, the killers, and the cases. Each chapter is a look at how Connelly the reporter views a crime and its aftermath.
The valid question that some reviewers have posed is: Why should we be interested in true crimes from the eighties and early nineties? After all, Connelly's fans buy his books because they love his delineation of fictional characters, his thoughtful exploration of what makes a homicide detective's life so harrowing, and his intriguing story lines. This book provides a different kind of pleasure: a glimpse at how a good reporter parlayed his considerable talent into successful fiction-writing. In "Crime Beat," Connelly describes misdeeds both horrifying and banal, criminals who are drug-addicted, delusional, or sociopathic, and victims who are sometimes innocent and occasionally just plain foolish.
For example, there is an eye-opening account of criminals who flee to Mexico to avoid standing trial in the United States. Connelly introduces us to two detectives who help Mexican authorities find and prosecute fugitives from American justice. Some civil libertarians believe that it is unfair to subject suspects who commit a crime on American soil to the Mexican justice system, which offers fewer protections to the defendant. However, the "foreign prosecution unit" has successfully survived all legal challenges, and authorities in both Mexico and the United States are satisfied with the unit's performance.
In other chapters, Connelly depicts a wide assortment of miscreants: rogue cops, a serial killer, a brazen bigamist, an inept gang of contract killers, and a vicious twenty-one year old man who butchered his own father. Not all of the cases are closed. Some remain open-unsolved until this day, and the reader's heart goes out to some victims' families who do not even have a body to bury.
Connelly has a gift for understanding and interpreting the criminal mind. He also has empathy for the harried, overworked, and often frustrated detectives whose tedious job it is to run down every lead. Cops love it when a suspect jumps out at them right away; however, perpetrators rarely confess immediately. Usually, detectives must work long hours conducting endless interviews, working the phones, checking computer databases, and following dozens of tips before they are ready to make an arrest. In clear, crisp prose, the author provides not only the bare facts, but he also clarifies the legal aspects of each case and gives the reader insight into the personalities involved.
My one quibble with "Crime Beat" is its excessive length. At a bit under four hundred pages, the book eventually becomes repetitious; there is considerable fat that could have been trimmed. Still, Connelly effectively shows how his keen powers of observation, fluid prose style, dark sense of humor, and understanding of what makes people tick has enabled him to make such a smooth transition from reporting to writing superb thrillers.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
