Book Review A Good Month for Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad

Rating: 2 Stars

I really ended up not liking this one much at all and I can't decide if that's because of the subjects or the author. This book could have and should have been much better.

I think the author is at least partly to blame; he is the book's creator after all. I was hoping for some kind of dissection of why this particular place in that particular time saw such a run of murders. But nothing here even attempts to explain how and/or why. Sure, we get demographic break-downs of the area, but that's about it. Without any discussion of that type, this simply becomes a voyeuristic look at life with a homicide squad. The writing was far too cavalier in some places, and that did not sit well with me either. Regardless of who the victims are, there has to be some kind of acknowledgment that while they might have been less savory characters in life, they are still human in death.

I do not think it is accurate to call this one true crime. It is much more about the detectives than the victims and suspects. Maybe we could call it 'true crime adjacent'. We meet so many detectives that, even though we are given the lists of who belongs to which squad, it is difficult to keep them all straight. After a while I honestly just started glossing over the detectives' names because they all ran together, nothing really distinguished one from another, unless it was a rookie detective on his first big case.

Definitely one from the library, if you choose to read it at all.