A masterpiece . . . Simon has exceptional literary gifts of eye and ear. Few novelists have written so well about the corrosiveness of the modern American city
MARTIN AMIS David Simon has single-handedly raised the bar for writing about crime, crime-fighting and the messy and imprecise business of justice to new and nearly unreachable levels . . . ... Read morea work of tremendous ambition which made everything in the genre to follow irrelevant
ANTHONY BOURDAIN True genius

Sunday Times

A hard-nosed classic

GQ

An extraordinary book

Guardian

Brilliant . . . desolate, sharp, poetic and passionate

Financial Times

The best book about homicide detectives by an American writer
NORMAN MAILER A staggering work that is almost impossible to put down . . . a gripping depiction of America's culture of violence . . . Simon conjures up his subjects' individual personalities in three-dimensional detail. The detectives leap off these pages . . . A raw, revelatory and utterly real account of life and death in Baltimore

Metro

The real delight is the discovery of Simon's perfect ear for dialogue; his masterful construction and pacing; and his empathy for his occasionally brutal but nevertheless inspirational subjects

Observer

Simon does an extraordinary job of getting under the skin and into the minds of the police officers

New York Times Book Review

A remarkable psychological and personal picture of 18 men labouring under immense pressure in traumatic circumstances . . . it is not just a majestic piece of reporting, it demonstrates Simon's instinctive ability to identify how the political and psychological interact . . . It reads like a thriller as he takes you through the desperate world of inner city West and East Baltimore, slaying by slaying

Daily Telegraph

A reporter who keeps his wits about him . . . A very good book

The New Yorker

Homicide is as intense a work of observation as you're likely ever to find, studded with Simon's caustic, wry and suspicious personality, as well as the ability to portray people as they truly are, usually a complicated shade of grey

Herald

Simon has captured the poetry of the meanest streets

Los Angeles Times

Homicide is a beautifully-written, almost poetic observation of a desperately harrowing subject and Simon deserves the highest praise for going to the darkest places of the underbelly of the American dream and coming out with a gripping account of what it is like to live and work there

Tribune

Brushes away the accretions of myth to reveal the banality of crime . . . it's a sober, unsurprised account of the desperately sad lives of people who commit most crimes and a quiet testimonial to the people who clear up the mess

Word Magazine

Remarkable . . . A True Crime Classic . . . a journalistic masterpiece of a brutal, bloody, bewildering year in the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit

Associated Press

Certainly one of the most engrossing police procedural mystery books ever written, not only because the crimes and plots and personalities are real, but because Simon is a terrific writer who has mastered the necessities and nuances of his material

Newsday

The world of urban violence has never been so well portrayed, nor has the day-to-day craft of the detective

Chicago Tribune

Simon followed a group of Baltimore detectives through a year on the mean streets. The resulting book is a hefty volume, giving Simon cope for a huge amount of detail and it's this, I think, that makes it such compulsive reading. How the detectives work - the crime they dace, the casual murders, the hopeless lives - all seen through Simon's eyes and those of the detectives he follows so closely

Publishing News

A frank, insightful, and meticulously detailed look at detectives and their work

San Francisco Chronicle

An amazingly frank and often hilarious tribute to homicide detectives everywhere . . . Simon has taken the art of covering cops to a new high

Washington Times

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