Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers

Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat in Florida and Los Angeles.

In vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader 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 of murder and its aftermath.

Connelly’s firsthand observations would lend inspiration to his novels, from The Black Echo, which was drawn from a real-life bank heist, to Trunk Music, based on an unsolved case of a man found in the trunk of his Rolls Royce. And the vital details of his best-known characters, both heroes and villains, would be drawn from the cops and killers he reported on: from loner detective Harry Bosch to the manipulative serial killer the Poet.

Stranger than fiction and every bit as gripping, this non-fiction collection contains an Introduction by Michael Connelly and an Afterword by Michael Carlson.

Crime Beat, a non-fiction collection, was originally released in 2005 in a limited edition by SCV Publications.