Best American Crime Reporting 2009

The 2009 edition was edited by Jeffrey Toobin, who I recall as a cable-news fixture in the '90s most notably on the O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky cases, on both of which he wrote serviceable, journeyman-like books. For all I know he's still a regular on cable news—my blood pressure doesn't allow me to look in on that circus very often any longer. Backstopped as always by Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook, it's likely that even a monkey from a Cary Grant movie could probably put together a creditable collection. Well, that's not entirely fair to Toobin; this is a good collection, and that's what counts. One case recounted here, in "Body Snatchers" by Dan P. Lee, involves a corrupt physician plying an illegal trade in harvested body parts on a surprising scale. It has since turned up more than once on Investigation Discovery channel shows (watch that channel long enough, I'm sorry to say I have discovered, and you start to see some of the same cases appearing with slightly different treatments on different shows). "Non-Lethal Force" by Alec Wilkinson is a nice examination of the ins and outs of law enforcement policy for controlling people without killing or unnecessarily harming them. There's an interesting piece on the JFK assassination too. And I was particularly struck by "Tribal Wars" by Matt McAllester, which recounts gang warfare troubles between Somalian refugees in my home town of Minneapolis, Minnesota—it's a situation that has developed since I left in the '80s and one I have been utterly oblivious to on return visits in recent years. Because it's on this personal level, it's hard to grasp, but there it all is, finely detailed. The usual spectrum of mayhem is present all through this collection, captured neatly in the list on the cover that someone evidently had a lot of fun putting together: "Suburban Murders," "Cage Fighter Cash Heists," "Lone Gunmen," "Credit Card Chaos," "Dead Presidents," "Mutilation in Mexico" (that's another Bowden article), "Migrating Miscreants," so on and so forth. The piece that has stuck with me most is called "American Murder Mystery" by Hanna Rosin. It looks at patterns of crime and housing in Memphis, Tennessee—which, as you may or may not know, has become one of the highest-crime cities in the U.S. in the past 15 years, along with Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; and other unlikely metro areas. It uncovers the disquieting, and discouraging, possibility of a connection with one strain of public housing policy. As usual these pieces are brisk and readable, and go by way too fast. Another worthy entry in this worthy series.

In case it's not at the library.