Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon chronicles a journalist’s exclusive one-year police “internship” in 1988, within Baltimore’s homicide investigative department. This is truly a remarkable piece of journalism. It’s hard and gritty, something you’d obviously expect coming into the book, but the author makes reading all six hundred pages a breeze. I initially wasn’t sold on the book with its being that many pages. Like seriously, how many homicides and murders do I need to read about to get the point? However, I’m so glad I picked it up. The cast of characters the author got to shadow and chronicle made all the difference. It wouldn’t take long for readers to realize that the detectives in the story and how they were willing to be their natural selves to be put in a story read by the public make this book such a blast. But make no mistake about it: Homicide is depressing. It goes over extremely violent crime scenes, and unlike in movies, not every one of them gets solved.

In a truly journalistic fashion, we get to experience what the detectives go through on a daily basis in the mean and unforgiving streets of Baltimore, where there seems to be a homicide at least once per day. At no point throughout the book does the detective acknowledge the author. He is strictly there to chronicle their daily routine and, at the same time, teach us how the streets work along with its vocabulary. While there are many cases that get documented throughout the book, there are a couple of high-profile cases that get more attention than the others, mainly due to how difficult they are to solve. The author expertly weaves the cases throughout the various chapters to tell a complete narrative. There are likely, however, to be times when it can be difficult to follow or remember them all, but it doesn’t get to the point of being problematic. It was also interesting to read about the political and chain-of-command battles that come with the territory.

You’re going to be laughing, crying, and frustrated by the time you’re done with this. To read about how a human life can simply be extinguished in the most horrific way possible because of a $10 debt can at times be unfathomable to many. To read about how a little girl can be defiled in the most satistic way prior to being murdered also in the most brutal way possible is just something that can stick with you. It doesn’t matter if the victim is a random dope fiend or not. The brutal way with which humans can treat each other truly has no limits. This makes the work of the homicide detectives that much more important because they naturally must try to solve each case, regardless of the victim’s age, race, gender, and standing in the community.