A winding account of a notorious murder in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In 2005, the mega-storm famously destroyed low-lying Black sections of New Orleans, mostly due to failed infrastructure. Across the Mississippi River, the "often-overlooked" Algiers community was on comparatively high ground and isolated by floodwaters. When looting broke out, the police responded with violence, writes Fishman, a former federal prosecutor and founder of Justice Innovation Lab. In one instance, an officer shot a 31-year-old Black man named Henry Glover as he approached a store. Glover's body, in the absence of mortuary services, was put in an abandoned car that was torched alongside the river: "All that remained was a skull, some ribs, and a leg bone." The police closed ranks to cover up involvement, and a long series of hearings and trials, which Fishman recounts with too much detail, did not deliver the desired outcome for all involved: Some officers went to jail, but some walked. Going on the ground to interview witnesses, the victim's family, some perpetrators, and the poor fellow who had to keep making payments on the burned car, Fishman constructs a careful case of his own. In the end, he warns, the Glover case shows "what can happen when our institutional systems fail, and the worst impulses of humanity spin out of control." In closing, the author notes that New Orleans has since reformed some of its police procedures to the point that it is now proselytizing for more humane, less violent encounters and more community policing. Ironically, however, this reform affects a city that is substantially less Black than before Katrina, and there remains plenty of police resistance to the mandated constraints. Retired officers, notes the author, often complain that "if we want to stop crime…unshackle the police and let them police the way they want to." A cautionary tale of unchecked police power and failed justice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

This riveting true crime saga from former federal prosecutor Fishman and Men's Journal contributing editor Hooper (Muscle Medicine) begins in 2009 when Fishman, then working in the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, came across a file on Henry Glover, a Black man whose body was found in a burned-out car atop a breached New Orleans levee after Hurricane Katrina. This launched a yearlong FBI investigation that culminated in the conclusion that Glover was killed by a white police officer and it was covered up by the New Orleans Police Department. Two officers ended up facing charges, one for federal civil rights violations involved in Glover's death and another for obstruction of justice. Fishman and Hooper meticulously detail the investigation, anonymous threats against the investigators, and the racism suffusing the case, generating real outrage when the verdict against Glover's killer is overturned on appeal. Coming 17 years after Glover's death and 10 years after the officer who killed him walked free, this is a scathing and timely look at police brutality in America. Readers will be gripped. Agent: Sam Stoloff, Frances Goldin Literary Agency. (Apr.)