The Savage City by T J English

The Savage City by T J English

A finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime

On August 28, 1963--the day Martin Luther King Jr. declared I have a dream on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial--two young white women were murdered in their Manhattan apartment. The so-called Career Girls Murders case sent ripples of fear throughout the city as police scrambled to find the killer. But it also marked the start of a ten-year saga of fear, racial violence, and turmoil in the city--as events progressed from the Harlem riots of the mid-1960s to the Panther Twenty-one trials and police corruption hearings of the early 1970s. The Savage City explores this traumatic decade through the stories of three very different men: George Whitmore Jr., an innocent black teenager coerced into confessing to murder; Bill Phillips, a brazenly crooked officer whose public testimony sparked the largest scandal in NYPD history; and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a founding member of New York's Black Panther Party, caught in the crossfire as the conflict between the Panthers and the police escalated into open warfare.

T. J. English is a noted journalist, a screenwriter, and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Havana Nocturne, Paddy Whacked, and The Savage City, as well as of The Westies, a national bestseller, and Born to Kill, which was nominated for an Edgar Award. He has written for Vanity Fair, Playboy, and Esquire, among other publications. His screenwriting credits include episodes of the television crime dramas NYPD Blue and Homicide, for which he was awarded the Humanitas Prize. He lives in New York City.