If you're a fan of prestige TV, you may recognize David Simon's name as the creator of The Wire. If you're a true aficionado of prestige TV, you may also recognize him as the creator of Homicide: Life on the Street, which ran on cable in the 90s. That show was born of this book, and this book was born of Simon's time as a reporter in Baltimore. He brings to his book what he later brought to his TV series: sweeping vision counterbalanced against intimate details, barely-disguised political commentary, and sandpaper-dry humor.

In fact, Simon brings so much of that stuff to Homicide (the book, not the show) that it becomes a little unwieldy. This is a long book, clocking in at roughly 600 pages, and I don't think it fully merits that length. Could it be that the length is meant to numb the reader in much the same way as the fourth act of Bolaño's 2666? Possibly, but again, I am a TV watcher, and easily bored.

In all seriousness, though, Homicide's length is a detriment, though not a major one. If 2666-esque repetition is the point, then I don't think it's executed quite as well. It's a case of intentionality: whereas 2666 deliberately made the murders nigh-indistinguishable, Homicide makes them all very interesting. The particulars of crime scene examination, interrogation, and charging suspects are almost fetishistically explained. I don't buy into the claims that Simon's work is copaganda (God I hate that word), but it's hard to come away from this book without at least a passing sense of respect for the detectives' abilities and the rigors of their work. If there is a central thesis to this book, it may simply be that homicide investigation is really, really, really tough, that it demands a hell of a lot from the people who do it for a living, that they're often stuck in impossible situations, and that those situations often lead to people – suspects and detectives alike – getting screwed. The job's a bitch, but it must be done.