Mitch Gelman was twenty-six years old and "green as a sapling" when he began covering car chases, shoot-outs, race crimes, and unspeakable violence in New York City. Landing a job as a beginning reporter for New York Newsday, the brash new tabloid in town, meant that his dream of writing about the city where he'd grown up was coming true. "The thrill I had when I walked by the uniformed cop guarding the door at Police Headquarters," he writes, "was the same one I had felt twenty years earlier when my father gave me my first baseball glove." His first day on the job was as much a rite of passage as any he'd experienced as a boy.Crime Scene is the gritty and compelling story of Gelman's first year on the police beat. We see him thrust into a world of mayhem and murder, transformed from a naive rookie into a hard-nosed reporter. With an eye for detail and the human side of the story, Gelman takes us inside the police department bureaucracy, around the waterfront shipyards, to the ghetto schoolyards where wannabe superstars can't stay off drugs. He trades war stories with other reporters at a famous Greenwich Village saloon and waits in hospital corridors where police hold vigils for fallen comrades.Relationships grow amidst the chaos: Gelman befriends an emergency-room surgeon and the wife of a critically wounded cop who show him that courage is the best weapon against the devastation of crime. He learns the intricate information-swapping dance performed by the police and the press. And he develops an uneasy, sometimes comic newsroom romance with a tenacious fellow reporter.As Gelman races to meet deadlines and nabs impossible-to-get news stories, his gripping tale takes on the dimensions of a fast-paced detective novel. Compassionate and candid even at its most breakneck moments, Crime Scene weaves together shocking true crime with a story about coming of age in the vortex of an American city under siege. Read Less