Crime story

FEBRUARY 7, 2012 Very Short List

NONFICTION Killing the Messenger

If you followed the headlines coming out of post-occupation Oakland, you might have asked yourself, “How did that particular city get to be so completely messed up?” Thomas Peele’s timely true-crime thriller ends just a few months before the occupation began and tells an even crazier story: that of Oakland’s Black Muslim Bakery, and the brazen assassination of a local reporter named Chauncey Bailey. Peele, one of the Bay Area’s best investigative journalists, covers the subsequent investigation and murder trial (which ended only last summer). He also digs up the bakery’s history, from its relation to the “Zebra” killings of the 1970s to its ties with local politicians. This is totally chilling, incredibly strange material, and the book is sweeping, site-specific, and compulsively readable. Very Short List