For the flight back from Pennsylvania, I bought & read Jill Leovy’s “Ghettoside”, because I forgot to bring a book and when I was in LA her Homicide Report was one of the only promising bits of journalistic effort in a pretty lackluster town.

It’s decent. Well, more. I have a tendency to scoff at things giving even competent generalist introductions to things I have history with; what I SHOULD say is it’s pitched at the airport-book level, but her details and analysis are fully in line with but more in-depth than mine.

She uses for a through-line the investigation of the murder of the son of a homicide detective; crime writers are traditionally good at balancing facts and social context and overall narrative and colorful anecdote and she’s no different - you realize a lot of her digressions front as pieces of the puzzle while merely being something interesting in proximity to the central story, but only in retrospect.

(That access issues might’ve precommitted her to the angle that the son was in fact a good boy who didn’t do nothing — that you notice in even later retrospect.)

One thing - I was reading her on the idiom of being “caught slippin’” and I was like “wait a second - is this the ghetto way of saying ‘around blacks, never relax’?”