Before becoming an international best-selling novelist, Michael Connelly worked the crime beat as a reporter. Like his award-winning fiction, Connelly's true crime reporting is filled with captivating people, vivid atmosphere and the telling detail of a veteran detective.

In these stories you will discover the early development of his socio-lyricism and hard-boiled style. His literary depth and narrative technique take the reader into the mindset of an investigator giving these stories great heart and suspense.

Each of these collected stories explores an enigma of our society. The reader is led past the yellow police tape and given an insider's view to a crime scene. Connelly searches beyond the cold facts of murder, madness and mayhem to find the heart of darkness. We are given psychological profiles of the victim, the killer and the team of investigators who will attempt to solve the crime. These stories will place you in the dark heart of America's mean streets.

"My experiences with cops and killers and days on the crime beat were invaluable to me as a novelist. There could not have been the novelist without there first being the reporter on the crime beat. I could not write about my fictional detective, Harry Bosch, without having written about the real detectives first. I could not create my killers without having talked to a few of the real ones first." - from the Foreword by Michael Connelly

This collection of newspaper stories contains a Foreword by Michael Connelly and an Afterword by Michael Carlson.