Martin Preib
AUTHOR

Martin Preib

Biographies & Memoirs
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Martin Preib is an officer in the Chicago Police Department—a beat cop whose first assignment as a rookie policeman was working on the wagon that picks up the dead. Inspired by Preib’s daily life on the job, The Wagon and Other Stories from the City chronicles the outer and inner lives of both a Chicago cop and the city itself. In his second collection of connected essays, Preib takes on seemingly unrelated murder cases, all dating from one year, 1982, including some in which offenders were released as part of the wrongful conviction movement. This book shatters reader assumptions—about the workings of justice, the objectivity of the media, and the role of the police in the city of Chicago, even calling into question allegations of police torture in the notorious cases against Jon Burge. Told in the gripping tension of a crime novel, Preib strives for the highest language as he wanders these brutal, controversial killings. In Preib's third book, Burn Patterns, he moves beyond the Porter case to the Madison Hobley arson, meticulously unraveling, strand by strand, the convoluted tapestry of Chicago's corruption that led to a 2003 pardon of Hobley by Illinois Governor George Ryan, allowing Hobley to walk free from the 1987 arson on Chicago's South Side that left seven people dead, including his own wife and child. Preib's ruminations run deep and wide, taking full account of the complex legal and political forces behind the Hobley exoneration. Preib's account of Hobley's crime, conviction, and exoneration leads him through painful self-discovery to startling revelations as he plumbs the depths of the city's corruption and confronts the forces that are trying to silence him.
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