I might never have read such a book but I know the author personally, and met him in Springfield, Massachusetts, my hometown, which features in the book. I read his book "Murder in the High Himalaya," as I have been to Nepal several times and am interested in its history. But a book about a bunch of gang bangers, drug addicts, thieves and murderers? I am now so glad I read it and applaud Jonathan Green on many levels. Green opens our eyes to an underworld that few Americans know. The story itself is gripping--we've all heard about the cocaine epidemics of the 1990s but most do not know the story behind the epidemics. You will after reading this. The writing is superb, nuanced, detailed, crisp; but the story-telling is the masterpiece. How does Green make us feel pity for these amoral, ruthless adults? By going back to their childhoods, their environments, their families, to expose how these failed structures produced lost children, who knew nothing in their lives but drugs and crime. This book is about relationships: the relationships each child had to their impoverished and crime-ridden project--Soundview; the relationships of criminal to criminal; between the criminal and the gang; gang to rival gang; authorities to gangs; and above all, criminal to cop... detective/fed O'Malley and NYPD's Forcelli. The book weaves all the relationships together deftly and intimately to show the rise and fall of each criminal and ultimately, the gang and the cocaine epidemic. And how each character influenced each other, for better or worse. It's a profound examination of personal stories that intersect and interweave, until at last you arrive at the relationships Green himself developed with each character. There are absolute good guys and bad guys yet Green, while not allowing anyone off the hook, is able to unveil a totality of humanity--with all its base love, evil, depravity-- while he chronicles the heinous crimes, subsequent captures, trials and downfall of SMM.As Green wrote to me, I now have an inkling of what my brother, an upstanding citizen who was a dedicated cop for 32 years, has gone through. The police put their lives on the line each day they deal with gangs and drugs, trying even to protect the gangs' own family, and even the gang members themselves from their own hollow future.I couldn't put the book down. Extremely well written, masterfully told, sad and true. Green has dedicated five years of extraordinary research to create a book and story that should be made into a movie so everyone can know this history, lest it is ever repeated.