Bestselling author Del Quentin Wilber tells the inside story of how a homicide squad, a dedicated, colorful team of detectives, does its almost impossible job Twelve homicides, three police-involved shootings and the furious hunt for an especially brutal killer-February 2013 was a good month for murder in suburban Washington, D.C. After gaining unparalleled access to the homicide unit in Prince George's County, which borders the nation's capital, Del Quentin Wilber begins shadowing the talented, often quirky detectives who get the call when a body falls. After a quiet couple of months, all hell breaks loose: suddenly every detective in the squad is scrambling to solve one shooting and stabbing after another. Meanwhile, the entire unit is obsessed with a stone-cold "red ball," a high-profile case involving a seventeen-year-old honor student attacked by a gunman who kicked down the door to her house and shot her in her bed. Murder is the police investigator's ultimate crucible: to solve a killing, a detective must speak for the dead. More than any recent book, A Good Month for Murder shows what it takes to succeed when the stakes couldn't possibly be higher.
"The book is briskly paced.... Wilber, a former Washington Post reporter, is painstaking in tracing how the detectives go about their fieldwork. The cat-and-mouse games they play with suspects in the interrogation room are fascinating."
The Washington Post
"Excellent.... Mr. Wilber has a keen reporter's eye and ear for detail and a deft pen that sometimes skewers with funny yet unstinting prose the very detectives who granted him entrée to their world…. Wilber gets high marks for placing readers smack inside the world of his characters?in the stuffy, fluorescent-lit homicide offices, the bloody murder scenes and the claustrophobic interview rooms as detectives cajole, intimidate and banter with witnesses."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Wilber is a former veteran Baltimore Sun and Washington Post reporter who spent one cold February in 2013 tailing…this group of hardened but dedicated detectives, bent on justice but beset by impossible odds. It's like David Simon's The Wire"
urgent but cold-eyed and tragic?and it's all true."
