Maryland’s mean streets

Quick tip, should you ever find yourself alone in the interview room at the police headquarters of Prince George’s County, Maryland: don’t go to sleep. The officers will see you through the peephole and assume you’re guilty. Anyone innocent finding themselves in that windowless, 8ft by 8ft room paces around, bounces on their toes and sobs. Only the guilty snooze there. It’s known as the ‘felony nap’.

Del Quentin Wilber learned a lot as he tailed the PG homicide squad during February 2013. His account of the experience is a non-fiction version of faction, the genre in which novelists incorporate real people into their stories. Coming at it from the opposite end of the spectrum, Wilber presents his facts as if in a novel. It makes for an eminently readable book. A drug dealer drives slowly past a cop ‘delivering a blatant eye-fuck’. Another cop is suspicious of someone’s confession: ‘This has been too easy … this is a world in which people lie, and then lie about their lies.’