At first, I thought Crime Scenes by Vespucci was sensational, American homicide stories for people in the UK, but only the first episode takes place in Disney’s planned community in Celebration, Florida. The settings of other episodes include an island in Wales, the Caribbean, and Australia. The episodes are the audiobook equivalent of TV shows like Unsolved Mysteries, featuring narrated dramatic reenactments. A very British-sounding narrator tells each homicide story interlaced with the voices of other actors reenacting the actual or plausible words of the story’s subjects. It’s cheesy and the pace is plodding in comparison to the massive amount of information in the previous audiobook I listened to We Own This City, but the stories were interesting enough.
Category: Books
We Own This City
Most of We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption by Justin Fenton follows Sergeant Wayne Jenkins in the series of crimes he and his unit, the Gun Trace Task Force, commit. This includes selling drugs they stole, stealing money, and beating, framing, and even killing people, namely criminals that do about the same things they do.
In the last third of the book, Jenkins and all members of his unit are arrested and prosecuted. This part of the book engaged me the most. In particular, it describes the mysterious death of Sean Suiter, a fellow dirty cop who was shot in the head the day before he was scheduled to testify against Jenkins’ unit. Upon closer examination, his death appeared to be an elaborate suicide, but it is officially classified as an unsolved homicide, perhaps executed by someone Suiter had wronged or done business with in the midst of his dirty-cop dealings.
I admit I listened to this book mostly while I was feeding my cats, and the first two thirds had trouble competing against their persistent meows. It did benefit from a second listen in that I was able to match clues I picked up toward the end of the book with details about crimes committed in the beginning of the book, but it still felt like a collection of stories about dirty cops being dirty. I suppose it was never a mystery that Jenkins was dirty, and it wasn’t presented that way. In fact, it sounded at times like it was an open secret that Jenkins and everyone else in the department was dirty, and yet he was trusted to lead an elite task force anyway. The mystery of Suiter’s death was so interesting in contrast that I wonder if the whole thing would have benefited from being presented as more of a mystery. There are plenty of stories to support that Jenkins was dirty, but what did people who trusted him see?
I wonder what the HBO series is like.