Crime Beat: True Crime Reports Of Cops And Killers

''Death is my beat.'' Those words, spoken by the narrator and hero of The Poet, Jack McEvoy, could also apply to Michael Connelly. Time and time again in these riveting true crime, non-fiction pieces, we make the connection between Connelly the crime reporter and Connelly the novelist:

''On the day I arrived in Los Angeles I sat in the newspaper editor''s office being interviewed for a job on the crime beat. The day before there had been a bank heist in which the thieves had gone into the city''s labyrinthine storm water tunnel system to get beneath the bank before tunnelling upward.'' Years later that story would become The Black Echo.

''Moments. They kept coming. One morning an editor called me and told me to swing by a murder scene on my way to the office. Just like that, like I was picking up a coffee on the way to work. The murder was on Woodrow Wilson Drive in the Hollywood Hills. I went as instructed and got the story. I also got the place where I would put the home of the fictional detective [Harry Bosch] I had secretly begun writing about . . .'' The cops, the killers, the cases - it''s all here in a collection that is a MUST for Connelly fans.